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BY THE SAME AUTHOR 



American Lands and Letters, 

The Mayflower to Rip Van-Winkle. With 
94 Illustrations. Square 8vo. $2.50. 

American Lands and Letters, 

Leather- Stocking to Poe's "Raven." 
With 115 Illustrations. Square 8vo. $2.50. 

English Lands, Letters and Kings. 

From Ce-lt to Tudor. i2mo. $1.50. 

English Lands, Letters and Kings* 

From Elizabeth to Anne. i2mo. $1.50. 

English Lands, Letters and Kings, 

Queen Anne and the Georges. i2mo. 
$1.50. 

English Lands, Letters and Kings. 

Later Georges to Queen Victoria. i2mo. 
$1.50. 



AMERICAN 
LANDS AND LETTERS 



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AMERICAN 
LANDS AND LETTERS 



Xeatber=StocF?ino 
lpoe'6 ''IRaven'' 



BY ^ 

DONALD G. MITCHELL 




NEW YORK 
CHAKLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

MDCCCXCIX 




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42764 

COPYKIGHT, 1899, BT 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 



TWO COPIES RECEIVED, 




SECOND COPV, 



TROW DIRECTORY 

PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANV 

NEW YORK 






/ "f 



TO THE LITTLE GROUP 

OF GRANDCHILDREN 

BORN AND BRED UPON THE SHORES OF 

THAT GREAT LAKE 

WHERE THEY BUILD CITIES AND BURN THEM— 

AND BUILD EXHIBITION PALACES 

{WHICH OUTSHINE ALL EXHIBITS) 

I DEDICATE 

THIS SECOND VOLUME OF AMERICAN TALKS 

TRUSTING IT MA V FIND 

A KINDLY READING IN THEIR HUSTLING WESTERN WORLD 

AND SPUR THEM TO KEEP ALIVE THAT TRAIL 

OF HOME JOURNEYINGS INTO THESE EASTERN QUIETUDES 

UNDER THE TREES 

WHICH WE GRAYHEADS LOVE 

D G. M. 

Edgeivood, Jutie, i8gg 



i( 



PREFACE. 



r I ^HIS record begins with times when the 
-^ wrathy independence of General Jackson 
made itself heard in Congressional corridors and 
when young ears were listening eagerly for new 
foot-falls of the brave ^^ Leather-Stocking '' in 
the paths of American woods ; and it closes with 
the lugubrious and memorable notes of the Raven 
of Foe. 

I had hoped to extend the record to embrace 
many another honored American name — whose 
birth-date belongs to the second decade of the 
present century. But the ''tale '^ of four hun- 
dred pages of text which confronts me is a warn- 

vii 



viii PREFACE. 

ing to stay the pen. A great welter of provision- 
ary notes, upon the table beside me, carries dates, 
memoranda, hints, and many an explosive jet of 
comment respecting the bouncing brilliancies of 
the Beecher family — the staid, orderly journey- 
man work of such as the Duyckincks or of Tuck- 
erman ; odd whiles, too, there flashes through 
this welter of notes, touches of the lambent hu- 
mor of Saxe, or of Frederic Cozzens ; we hear 
the click of Henry Herbert's reel, interchang- 
ing with the click of his Oxford classicism, and 
that further click of the j)istol, which (by his 
own hand) wrought his death. 

We have glimpses of that handsome New Eng- 
lander Motley, who — tiring of effort to kindle 
romance on '* Merry-Mount " — went over seas 
to light up great Dutch levels with historic fires 
— lurid at times — but always high, and shining 
and fine. Then lifts into view that notable group 
of writers which, toward the close of the second 
decade of the century, came, within the same 



PREFACE, ix 

twelvemonth (1819), upon the stage of life. 
Among these were Dr. Parsons — hardly jet ac- 
credited his due laurels of song ; Whipple, also — 
turning his protuberant eyes, full of keen discern- 
ment, upon all ranges of work, and reporting 
thereupon in language that flowed like a river. 
J. G. Holland was another who put New Eng- 
land flavors into a clever " Bitter-Sweet " verse, 
and into his '^ Poor Richard '^ prose, the exal- 
tations of common-sense. Melville — of whom 
we have had brief speech — was among these 
** Nineteeners," and gave a lively Munchausen 
relish to his stories of the Southern Seas. The 
'' good, gray '' poet. Whitman was a boy when 
these were boys, and never saw suffering without 
himself suffering ; if he gather coarse weeds into 
his '' Leaves of Grass," we forget and forgive it 
when he doffs his cap, in reverent and courtly 
fashion to "My Captain." 

Last of this group is that dominant figure 
among them who Joined to poetic graces the 



X PREFACE. 

large tact of a diplomat, and who (as the ob- 
servant and entertaining Dr. Hale has recently 
shown to us) by his tender and gracious humani- 
ties made ^' the man Lowell '' a worthier person- 
age than even Lowell the poet. 

That budget of memoranda within which I see 
the kindly light on these names — and other such 
— come and go, I turn over and put away, and 
handle again — loath to part wholly with them — 
yearning a little to say more than an old man 
should be permitted to say. 

Allons done! let us lay our dead notes to cover, 
without ever a whimper ; and we will listen, with 
the rest, to the new and younger and keener talk- 
ers ; these may bring to the work a larger famil- 
iarity with the subject, or fuller knowledge ; but 
not — surely — a more earnest love for things and 
men American, or a sharper resolve to tell only 
the truth. 

Edgewood, June, 1899. 



CONTENTS, 



CHAPTER I. 

PAGE 

In New York and Philadelphia, . ... 2 

Other Cities, Inns, and Libraries, ... 17 
Two Georgians, ........ 23 

Prom West to East, .28 

Poet Bancroft, ........ 33 

Round Hill School, 36 

Librarian Cogswell, ....... 42 

Bancroft as Politician and Historian, . . 4(j 

Office-holder and Diplomat, . . . . .51 

George P. Marsh, ....... 5!) 

Home and Second Embassy, . . . . .67 

CHAPTER IL 

Horace Bushnell, 75 

A Vital Preacher, 79 

The Man and the Artist, 87 

A Man of Other Mettle, ..;... 95 



xii CONTENTS. 



PAGE 



Journalist and Man of the World, . . . 100 
London, Owego, and Idlewild, .... 106 

Three New Yorkers, 114 

Southrons and Dr. Ware, 118 



CHAPTER III. 

A New England Sage, 135 

Emerson at Concord, 141 

Early Experiences and Utterances, . . . 144 
George Ripley and Brook Farm, . . . .155 
Other Brook-Farmers and Sympathizers, . . 165 
Two Doctors, 169 

FULLER-OSSOLI, . . . ' 177 

Alcott of THE Orphic Sayings, .... 184 
Concord Again, 188 



CHAPTER IV. 

Hawthorne, ...••••• 202 

College Mates and Associations, . . .211 

From College to Manse, 215 

The Surveyorship and Life at Lenox, . . 226 

Life in Berkshire, 232 

Religious Qualities in Hawthorne, . . .237 

New Changes, 240 

Hawthorne's Personality, 243 

European Life, 254 

Home Again and the End, 260 



CONTENTS. xiii 



CHAPTER V. 

PAGE 

A Naturalist, 271 

Reformer and Writer, ...... 276 

Thoreau's Later Reputation, • • . , 278 

A Poet's Youth, 282 

A Harvard Professor, 287 

Later Work and Years, 294 

Another New Englander, ..... 305 

A Half-known Author, 322 



CHAPTER VL 

Poet and Professor, , 332 

As Autocrat, 342 

Some Other Doctors, ...... 354 

Horace Greeley, 359 

The Chappaqua Farm, 366 

Bred in the Purple, ...... 373 

Soldier and Poet, ....... 377 

Philadelphia to New York, ..... 383 

-Fordham and Closing Sc^es, 389 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS, 



NATHAXIEL HAWTHORXE . . Frontispiece 

From a photograph taken by Mayal, in London, in 1860. 

PAGE 

CITY HALL AXD PARK, XEW YORK, ABOUT 

1830 1 

THE CAPITOL AT WASHINGTON IN 1837 . 3 

From, an engraving by Bentley, after a drawing by Bartlett. 

PHILIP HONE . . .... 5 

From a?i engraving by Rogers. 

LOOKING UP BROADWAY FROM ST. PAULAS 

CHURCH IN 1830 7 

From a Sicedish engraving by Akrell, after a dtmcing by 
Elinckowstrom. 

DAVID HOSACK 11 

From an engraving by Durand of the portrait by Sully. 

THE OLD CAREY BOOK-STORE IN PHILADEL- 
PHIA 12 

Coi'ner of Chestnut and Fourth Streets. 

HENRY C. CAREY 13 

From an engraving by Sartain. 

GIRARD^S BANK, PHILADELPHIA, IN 1831 . 15 
From a7i engraving by Sears, after a drawing by Burton. 



xvi LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS, 



FRAXKLIis' IXSTITUTE, PHILADELPHIA, IX 

1831 21 

From an engraving by Sears, after a drawing by Burton. 

RICHARD HEI^RY WILDE . . . .25 

From an engraving by Sartain of a portrait by Johnson. 

AUGUSTUS B. LOXGSTREET . . . .27 

From an engraving by Buttre. 

THE CITY OF CHICAGO I>>^ 1831 . . .29 

From an English lithograph. 

THE OLD ADAMS HOME AT BRAIXTREE, 

31ASS 31 

ROUXD HILL SCHOOL ABOUT 1829 . . 37 

Fi'oia a copy of an old lithograph owned by Colonel J. B. 
Trumbull. . 

DR. COGSWELL 43 

GEORGE BAXCROFT IX 1854 . . . .49 

Fro77i the crayon portrait by Samuel Lawrence {co7isidered by 
Mr. John C. Bancroft the best jjortrait extant of hus father). 

MR. BAXCROFT IX HIS LIBRARY AT WASH- 

IXGTOX 53 

From a photograph taken about 1884. 

GEORGE BAXCROFT 57 

F7'om a photograph take7i at Xeicport in 1884. 

GEORGE P. MARSH HOMESTEAD AXD BIRTH- 
PLACE AT WOODSTOCK, VERMOXT . .61 

GEORGE P. MARSH 63 

FRAGMEXT OF A LETTER FROM GEORGE P. 

MARSH 71 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. xvii 

PAGE 

LAKE WAR AM AUG 76 

HORACE BUSHXELL .... . 81 

After the crayon portrait by Rowse. 

BUSHKELL PARK 93 

ASCEi^T TO THE CAPITOL, WASHINGTON . 98 

N. P. WILLIS 101 

From a photograph loaned by Mr. Peter Gilsey. 

GEORGE P. MORRIS 103 

From an engi'avingby Hollyer, after a drawing by Elliott. 

K. P. WILLIS IN HIS LATER YEARS . . 104 

Copyright by Bocktvood. 

fragment of a letter from n. p. willis 108 
''idlewild/' n. p. Willis's home on the 

HUDSON Ill 

monument to STEPHENS, CHAUNCEY, AND 

ASPINWALL AT COLON .... 115 
From a photograph loaned by Mr. S. Deming. 

THE STEPHENS TREE 116 

From a photograph loaned by Mr. S. Deming. 

JOHN R. BARTLETT 118 

From, an engraving by Buttre. 

C. FENNO HOFFMAN 119 

From an engraving by Dick, after the ]Jortrait by Ininan. 



xviii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. 

PAGE 

WILLIAM GILMORE SIMMS .... 121 
From a daguerreotype, 

THOMAS SMITH GRIMKE .... 123 

J. P. KEN'iTEDY 127 

From an engraving by Whelpley. 

TITLE-PAGE OF ^'THE KNICKERBOCKER 

MONTHLY MAGAZINE ^' . . . . 129 

W. WARE 131 

YALE COLLEGE IN 1820 .... 133 

EMERSON 137 

From a portrait by Hawes. 

emerson at his desk . o . . . 145 
Emerson's house at concord . . .146 

A CORNER OF EMERSON'S STUDY . . . 147 

EMERSON IN 1847 151 

GEORGE RIPLEY 156 

THE POOL AT BROOK FARM .... 157 

IN THE AVOODS AT BROOK FARM . . . 163 

JOHN S. DWIGHT 165 

WM. HENRY CHANNING .... 166 

From a photograph loaned by Thomas Wentioorth Higginson. 

BROOK FARM TO-DAY 167 

MRS. LYDIA MARIA CHILD .... 170 

THEODORE PARKER 173 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS, xix 

PAGE 

MARGARET FULLER 177 

MARGARET FULLER COTTAGE .... 179 

BROOK FARM, FROM THE MARGARET FULLER 

COTTAGE ... . . 181 

A. BROKSOK ALCOTT 185 

THE ALCOTT SCHOOL OF PHILOSOPHY AT 

COKCORD 189 

Emerson's grave 197 

HAWTHORKE's birthplace, SALEM . . 202 

CAPTAIK IS'ATHANIEL HATHORN^E , . . 203 

From a miniature in the possession of Julian Hawthorne, Esq. 

ON" THE SHORES OF SEBAGO LAKE . .. 207 

BOWDOIK COLLEGE IN" 1822 .... 209 
From a ptHnt made from, a painting by J. C. Brown, in the col- 
lection of the Bowdoin College Library. 

JACOB ABBOTT ...... 212 

HORATIO BRIDGE . . . . . . 214 

From "Perso7ial Recollections of Nathaniel Hawthorne,'' Harper 
dc Brothers, 18'.)3. 

FAC-SIMILE OF THE TITLE-PAGE OF HAW- 

THORNE's FIRST BOOK .... 216 

FRONTISPIECE TO THE RARE EDITION OF 

1839, OF Hawthorne's '' gentle boy " 219 

From a copy in the collection of Peter Gilsey, Esq. 
THE OLD MANSE, CONCORD .... 221 
THE CUSTOM-HOUSE, SALEM .... 227 



XX LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. 



REDUCED FAC-SIMILE OF HAWTHORXE's 

STAMP AS SURVEYOR .... 228 

JAMES T. FIELDS . . . . . . 231 

THE BERKSHIRE HILLS, FROM A POINT OF 
VIEW NEAR THE SITE OF THE RED 
HOUSE 233 

HERMAN MELVILLE 235 

From a photograph in the collectioti of Robert Coster, Esq. 

WAYSIDE , , 241 

W. D. TICKNOR 244 

HAWTHORNE AT THE AGE OF FORTY-EIGHT 245 

From a portrait painted t« 185^ by C. G. Thovipsoii, aiid now in 
the possession of Mrs, Rose Hawtfiorne Lathrop. 

FRANKLIN PIERCE 248 

WILLARD'S hotel as it APPEARED IN THE 

^FIFTIES 250 

From a print in the collection of James F. Hood, Esq., of Wash- 
i7igton. 

W. W. STORY 256 

THE TREVI FOUNTAIN, ROME . . . 257 

HAWTHORNE IN 1862 259 

From a photograph taken by Brady, in Washington. 

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE .... 261 

From a photograph given by Rawthorne to the author in the 
Spring of 1862. 

CONCORD RIVER, FROM NASHAWTUC HILL 262 

FAC-SIMILE OF THE FIRST PAGE OF A LETTER 

FROM HAWTHORNE 264 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS, xxi 

PAGE 

HAWTHORNE^S GRAVE AT SLEEPY HOLLOW, 

COI^CORD 267 

Hilda's tower . " 270 

henry d. thoreau 273 

From a crayon drawing by Roivse, 

w^alden pond 274 

desk, bed, and chair used in the hut 
at walden pond 276 

Now iti the possession of the Antiquarian Society oj Coiicord. 

thoreau's flute, spyglass, and copy of 
Wilson's ornithology . . . 279 

thoreau's grave .... . . 281 

house in portland, me., in which long- 
felloav was born .... 283 

professor, later president, felton, of 

HARVARD 287 

THE CRAIGIE HOUSE, LONGFELLOW's HOME, 

CAMBRIDGE 291 

MRS. LONGFELLOAV 293 

From a reproduction of Rowse's crayon portrait. 

LONGFELLOW AT THE AGE OF FORTY-FOUR 295 

From an engraving by W. H. Mote, made i7i Londo?i, in 1851. 

FAC-SIMILE OF LONGFELLOW's HANDWRITING 297 

H. W\ LONGFELLOW 298 

From a photograph in the collection of Mr. Peter Gilsey. 

LONGFELLOW IN HIS LIBRARY . . . 299 



xxii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS, 

PAGE 

H. W. LOI^GFELLOW 303 

WHITTIER's birthplace, east HAVERHILL, 

MASS. 306 

WHITTIER's HOUSE AT DAKYERS, MASS. . 308 

FAC-SIMILE OF A PORTION OF THE FIRST 
PAGE OF THE ^^ NEW ENGLAND WEEKLY 

REVIEW '' 309 

From the collection of the Connecticut Historical Society of Hart- 
ford. 

CALEB CUSHIN6 311 

From a photograph taken in 1870. 

WHITTIER's HOME AT AMESBURY, MASS. . 312 

W^HITTIER AT THE 4GE OF THIRTY-ONE . 313 

From a crayon draioing of a daguerreotyjje taken in 1838. 

FAC-SIMILE OF THE FINAL LINES OF " MAUD 

MULLER" 316 

JOHN G. WHITTIER 319 

A QUIET DAY ON THE MERRIMAC . . . 321 

THE KENNEBEC JUST BELOW AUGUSTA . 323 

SYLVESTER JUDD 326 

Reproduced from an old print. 

REDUCED FAC-SIMILE OF A DRAWING BY DAR- 

LEY IN SYLVESTER JUDD's " MARGARET " 328 

FAC-SIMILE OF DR. HOLMES'S HANDWRITING 333 

THE " GAMBREL-ROOFED HOUSE" IN CAM- 
BRIDGE IN W^HICH DR. HOLMES WAS 
BORN 335 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. xxiii 

PAGE 

COMMEI^CEMEXT DAY AT HARVARD IX 

HOLMES'S TIME 337 

From the frontispiece to Josiah Quincy''s " Histoiy of Harvard 
University." 

THE OLD HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL, BOSTON 3-il 

HOLMES WHEN A YOUNG MAN . . . 344 

From a photograph by Haioes. 

LIBRARY IN DR. HOLMES'S BEACON STREET 

HOUSE, BOSTON 347 

DR. HOLMES IN HIS FAVORITE SEAT AT HIS 

SUMMER HOME AT BEVERLY . . . 351 

From an unpublished photograph taken by the late Arthur 
Dexter, Esq., about two weeks before Dr. Holmes's death. 

THEODORE D. WOOLSEY 355 

From a photograph taJien in 1876. 

NOAH PORTER 356 

From, a photograph taken about 1872. 

JAMES FREEMAN CLARKE .... 357 

From a photograph taken m 1883. 

HOUSE AT AMHERST, N. H., IN WHICH GREE- 
LEY WAS BORN 359 

HORACE GREELEY 361 

From a daguerreotype in the collection of Mr. Peter Gilsey. 

GREELEY AT HIS DESK IN THE '' TRIBUNE"' 

OFFICE 364 

THE GREELEY BARN AT CHAPPAQUA . . 367 

Noio occupied as a residence by tfie family of Mrs. F. M. Clen- 
denin (Gabrielle Greeley). 

GREELEY IN THE AVOODS OF CHAPPAQUA 371 
From a photograph taken in 1869, at the instance of the author, 
and now m his possession. 



xxiv LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. 

PAGE 

ELIZABETH (ARI^OLD) POE, MOTHER OF THE 

POET 375 

From a reproduction of a miniature in the possession of John 
H. Ingram, Esq. 

FAC-SIMILE OF THE TITLE-PAGE OF POE's 

FIRST BOOK 378 

From the copy in the possession of Thomas F. McKee, Esq., of 
New York. 

THE alla:n" house, richmokd, ya. . . 381 

EDGAR ALLAIT POE 385 

From a reproduction of a daguerreotype formerly in the pos- 
session of "Stella''' (Mrs. Estelle S. A. Lewis), tioiv the prop- 
erty of John IT. Ingrain, Esq. 

THE POE COTTAGE AT FORDHAM . . . 389 

HIGH BRIDGE^ LOOKIITG TOWARD FORDHAM 

HEIGHTS 390 

fac-simile of the makuscript of one of 
poe's stories 392 

From the collection of G. M. Williamson, Esq., of Grand- View- 
on-Hudson. 

EDGAR ALLAN" POE 397 

From the Poe Memorial, Richard Hamilton Park, sculptor, 
presented to the Metropolitan Museum of Art by the actors 
of New York. 



AMERICAN 
LANDS AND LETTERS 



i 




AMERICAN LANDS & 
LETTERS, 



CHAPTER I. 

OUR new story of American Lands and Letters 
brings us npon scenes and experiences which 
belonged to the opening years of the third decade 
of the present century. Monroe^s '' era of good 
feeling " was drawing to a close. Florida, only 
recently acquired from Spain (1821), gave to the 
United States control of all the Gulf shores from 
Key West to the Sabine River. The city of Wash- 
ington had fairly recovered from the ugly British 



2 AMERICAN LANDS &- LETTERS. 

burning of the Caj^itol and library (1814) ; and the 
great, dusty spaces of its avenues and Mali were 
enlivened by the political groups which were mass- 
ing around such crystallizing centres as John 
Quincy Adams, or General Jackson, or De Witt 
Clinton, or Calhoun. The wily Martin van Buren 
and his Albany Regency were beginning to be 
topics of talk at ^'^Gadsby^s'^ in these days ; and so 
were those ^^ infant industries'^ which sought and 
secured tender tariff-coddling at the hands of such 
trained nurses as Daniel AYebster and Henry Clay, 
and which have since bravely cast their swaddling 
clothes, and can urge their own claims for nourish- 
ment — roundly and jinglingly. 

In New York and Philadelphia. 

After the burning of the Capitol and its books, 
the Government had purchased, at a price which 
was not one-fourth of its value, the library of ex- 
President Jefferson ; and the old gentleman (who 
thus provided the nucleus of that vast agglomera- 
tion of books now known as the Congressional 
Library) survived many years thereafter, and in 
tottering age assisted at the inauguration (1825) 



VIRGINIA UNIVERSITY. 



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Fro7n an enf^raviii^ by Rogers, 




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of that University of Virginia — lying in a beauti- 
ful lap of the Blue Eidge region — whose founda- 
tion and up-building the veteran statesman had 
year by year inspected and approved. 

Jefferson was not apt in finances, and there 



6 AMERICAN LANDS &- LETTERS. 

were fears that his liberalities and lack of caution 
in his later days would bring him to poverty ; but 
brave and generous ones came to his relief. 
Among them that Philip Hone,* one-time (1826) 
Mayor of 'New York, who in 1822 purchased a 
fine house (for $25,000) on Broadway, opposite 
that end of the city park where the great Post- 
office now cumbers the ground ; but where trees 
and grass grew then^ with a tall wooden paling 
about them, over which the Mayor and his guests 
(of whom he had always abundance) saw the fresh 
splendor of the marble City Hall. 

Dr. Hosackf too, at his elegant Chambers 
Street home, vied in that day with the last-named 
gentleman in the entertainment of strangers of 
distinction ; and his famous Saturday evening 
parties were known far and wide. 

Between 1820 and 1830, before yet the railway 

* Philip Hone, b. 1781 ; d. 1851. His Journal^ etc., edited 
by Bayard Tuckerman, New York, 1889, 2 vols. 8vo, has 
in it very much of lively interest. 

f David Hosack, b. 1769; d. 1835. In addition to profes- 
sional works of repute he published Memoirs of De WHt 
Clinton and Ilortus Elginensis^ a valued account of his 
garden plants. 







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JOHN SANDERSON, 9 

was a great helper of travel^ the swiftest mail- 
carrier between Philadelphia and New York would 
reckon upon some twelve hours as the measure of 
his speed ; and it was counted quite a wonderful 
event when Cooper, the actor, who had a fine 
house upon the banks of the Schuylkill, under- 
took to play on alternate nights in such far-apart 
places as Philadelphia and New York ! 

The savors of the Portfolio,^ made famous by 
the loyalist Joseph Dennie, had left a lingering 
fragrance in the Quaker City. Kobert Walsh, Jr., 
a trenchant journalist, long known afterward as 
our Consul at Paris, was at work there ; so was the 
biographer f of the Signers of the Declaration, who 
gave later such attractive liveliness to his ^^ Ameri- 
can in Paris," of which a brother wit said, with 
clever mensuration — ^^ ^twas the only book of 
travels he knew which was, at once, too broad, 
and not long enough." 

* Finally given up in 1827. In its later years it had many 
funny examples of art, on steel and copper, in illustration of 
Fenimore Cooper, and others. 

f John Sanderson, of the High School, Philadelphia, b. 
1783 ; d. 1844. Biography of the Signers of the Declaration of 
Independence^ Philadelphia, 1820-27 ; American in Paris^ 1834. 



lO 



AMERICAN LANDS &- LETTERS. 



I 



He had a taste for the table and its enticements, 
as strong, as piquant, and as searching as his taste 
for the blandishments of pretty women and engag- 
ing toilettes. There are descriptions of Parisian 
dinners in his American in Paris which fairly 
scintillate with provocatives of apj)etite and with 
constellations of cookery ; all the more tempting 
was his talk of Apician delicacies, since it was 
broidered and savored by abounding Latinity and 
by pungent Roman flavors swirling down on 
classic tides from the days of Lucullus. 

The ^'^ Wistar parties^' were then in vogue in 
Philadelphia, keeping alive the memory of a dis- 
tinguished physician, whose name has even now 
large literary significance, besides pretty reminders 
in the clustered tassels of the blooming Wistaria. 
As early as 1821, old Matthew Carey (of Irish birth 
and book-making repute) had retired from the 
headship of his book-house on Chestnut Street 
in favor of his son Henry C. Care}",* a bright, 



* Henry C. Carey, b. 1793 ; d. 1879. Principles of Polit- 
ical Economy^ 3 vols., 1837-40. On International Co-py- 
W^Jt^, 1853; Theory to Out-do England Without Fighting 
Her^ 1865. 



THE CAREYS. 



II 




From an e}igravi7ig by Durand of the portrait hy Sitlly, 



>V. 




^^ yf"^ 




shrewd, black-eyed, and dominant man, 
who wrote afterward, with mnch cliic and 
thorough thinking, on economic subjects, and 
whose house became famous for its entertain- 



12 AMERICAN LANDS &- LETTERS. 

ments and for its ^^offerings '^ of excellent Eliine 



wine. 




COimER OF CHESNTJT &: M)IJIITH STBEETS . 





The Old Carey Book-store in Philadelphia. 

This house of Carey, under some one of its Pro- 
tean names,* reprinted by arrangement with Con- 
stable & Co., the Waverley novels, which as soon 
as they left the binders' hands in Philadelphia, 
were dispatched by a specially chartered stage- 
coach, over hill and dale, for the supply of New 
York buyers. 

Both Cooper and Irving also were among the 
authors who were '^'^ booked" by this famous Phil- 

* The proper succession of firm-titles was : Matthew Ca- 
rey; Matthew Carey & Son; Carey, Lea & Carey; Carey, 
Lea &Blanchard; E. L. Carey & A. Hart; Carey & Hart; 
Lea & Blanchard ; A. Hart; Henry C. Lea, etc. 

Vide : One Hundred Years of Ptihlishing^ 1785-1885 ; Lea, 
Bros. & Co. ; also, Smyth's Philadelphia Magazines^ etc. 



THE CAREYS. 



13 




Fro7n an engraving by Sariain. 

adelphia house. Nor must we forget, while in the 
Quaker City, that zealous and capable journalist, 
Joseph E. Chandler, who gave to the United 
States Gazette its great repute; nor that other 



14 AMERICAN LANDS &- LETTERS. 

politician and financier, the handsome Nicholas 
Biddle, active in establishment of Girard Col- 
lege, and who for a time managed the Portfolio 
journal Avith the same qnick decision which he put 
to the management of the United States Bank. 

The Recollections of Samuel Breck,* who died 
over ninety, in 1862, are worth noting. He 
wrote very much in the easy, confidential spirit 
of Pepys, and of our friend Judge Sewall. As 
early as 1820 he laments the lack of good servants. 

" Mrs. B discharged a servant-girl to-day for fihhing 

and mischief-making ; . . . has been nearly three years 
in my family. . , . No sooner was she entitled to receive 
a few dollars than she squandered them in finery . . . 
bedecking herself in merino shawls, chip bonnets, etc., with- 
out laying up fifteen dollars, tho' she had rec'd from one dol- 
lar and a half to one dollar and a quarter per week ! " (p. 298) . 

And again, he philosophizes in this delightful 
fashion respecting the introduction of steam upon 
boats and railways: 

" Steam in many respects interferes with the comfort of 
travelling — destroys every salutary distinction in society, 

* Recollections^ etc., of Samuel Breck. Porter & Coates, 
Philadelphia, 1877. 




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SAMUEL BRECK. 17 

and overturns by its whirl-a-gig poAver the once rational, gen- 
tlemanly, and safe mode of getting along on a journey. 
. Ta'.k of ladies on board a steamboat or in a rail- 
road car ! There are none. ... To restore herself to 
her caste, let a lady move in select company at five miles an 
hour, and take her meals in comfort at a good inn, Avhere she 
may dine decently " (pp. 276-79). 



Other Cities, Inns and lAbraries. 

Mr. Breck, the old Philadelphia merchant, says, 
in his diary under date of 1829 : 

" There run between Philadelphia and New York, 44 
coaches connected with steamboats coming and going, carry- 
ing a daily average of 350 to 400 passengers ! " 

^^Yet/^ he continues — ^^in going over the same 
route in August, 1789, I had the whole stage to 
myself." And our old friend Philip Hone, of 
the " Diary/"* writes, under date of 1828 : 

" We started [from Albany] at 10 o'clock, in an extra 
stage for Boston, by the way of Lebanon, Northampton, etc. 
We gave $70 for the coach to convey the party of seven per- 
sons to Boston. [And again, at Northampton.] We vis- 
ited, in the afternoon, the Round Hill School, and were 
politely entertained by Mr. Bancroft." 

I shall make no apology for these marginalia, or 



l8 AMERICAN LANDS &- LETTERS. 

what may seem isolated facts ; they are not given 
by way of gossip or to engage flagging attention, 
but rather as so many bits of color which shall 
contribute — each its share — in making up and 
revivifying the atmosphere of the time, and in 
bringing into view, without the reader's cogni- 
zance, the ebb and flow of every-day life. Under 
such conditions the writers we have named, or 
shall name, were ripening for their work, or be- 
ginning it, or making its matured utterance. 
How it may be with others I cannot say, but 
with me the buzz of travel, the roll of the coach, 
the swinging of the inn sign, the stars that 
are shining in this or that theatre, the clanging 
knell for this or that hero, the jolly echo of 
this or that fete day breaking on the ear, do 
somehow bring back the time, and give a real and 
unforgetable setting to the men and women we 
talk of. 

It was in 1836 that Mayor Hone sold that grand 
house of his opposite City Hall Park, thence- 
forward to become a part of the great hostel- 
ry made eminent by the mastership of the elder 
Cozzens ; and the ex-mayor, in his diary, tells us 



MARGINALIA. 19 

of the price lie received for it — 160,000 — and 
says, in quernlons mood .: 

"What shall I do ? Lots of good size witliin two miles 
of the City Hall are selling at from $8,000 to $10,000 ; and 
turkeys at $1.50 each ! " 

Poor man ; he ended with buying a lot for 
a new house ^^up town," at Broadway and Great 
Jones Street. 

One who walked in lower Broadway in those 
days might have seen, not far from the Park 
palings, a little gold eagle, with extended wings, 
that marked the entrance upon a jewelry establish- 
ment with the name of ^''Marquand" athwart its 
door — a name which has since been endeared by 
association with beneficent gifts. 

The old Society Library, representing one of the 
very first associated efforts to ^provide books for 
New Yorkers, was considering the erection of a 
new house for its treasures upon the '^'^up-town" 
corner of Leonard Street and Broadway. 

In Philadelphia the Franklin Institute (found- 
ed 1821) was thriving, while the Philosophical 
Society and Library Company were of much older 
establishment ; so, too, was that venerable '^ Lo- 



20 AMERICAN LANDS &- LETTERS, 

ganian " gift of books, which boasted the ohlest 
material shelter ever given to a public library in 
America. Nor must we omit mention of the 
severe Doric front (highly admired in its day) of 
the ancient Redwood Library in Newport, calling 
up recollections of the Collinses, and of Ezra 
Stiles, and the Channings. While far in the 
South, the venerable Charleston Library had been 
founded long before the Revolution, and — burned 
or preyed upon through years of war — had held 
its own in some locality near to the site where it 
still survives in goodly ag6. There, in the first 
quarter of this century, many leisure-loving de- 
scendants of the Huguenots found their way to 
pore over the musty quartos, or perhaps to discuss 
the growing fortunes of that bright, up-country 
man, John C. Calhoun, or of that other clever 
Carolinian, Robert Y. Hayne (U. S. Senator 1826- 
32), who was fast ripening his faculties — legal and 
forensic — for those famous contests that were to 
ensue with Daniel Webster and others. Meantime 
Colonel William Alston (who had fought in Mar- 
ion's Legion in Revolutionary days) used to drive 
down from his Waccamaw plantation with his 




Franklin Institute, Philadelpliia, in 1831. 

Fro7n an engra-ving by Sears, after a draivutg by J.urton. 



LIBRARIES. 23 

four-in-haud team, through forests of the long- 
leaved pines, where flocks of wild turkeys lurked 
— sometimes straying athwart the high-road — and 
dashed with a tempest of outcries from young 
negroes of the household through the tall gates 
of the old Brewton homestead. 

A far-cry it may be, perhaps, from the mention 
of a typical old-style planter — who, if his rice crop 
came in well, ordered luxurious hangings and 
Turkish rugs, from London, for his King Street 
house — to things of literary moment or relation- 
ship. And yet this fast-driving colonel and planter 
was the father of that Governor Joseph Alston 
(1812-14) who won and married the beautiful 
Theodosia Burr (only child of Aaron Burr and 
great-granddaughter of Jonathan Edwards), who 
on a fateful and fair morning of December, 1812, 
sailed away from a Georgetown dock and was 
never heard of more. 

Two Georgians. 

Over the border of the adjoining State, where, 
in Colonial days, the eloquent AVhitefield had 
made his voice heard near to the cane-brakes, 



24 AMERICAN LANDS &- LETTERS. 

and where Macpherson, of Ossian fame, had 
pushed his bargains with the kindly and noble 
Oglethorpe, there lived an Irishman, Richard 
Henry Wilde — (born 1T89), but an American in 
heartiness and by adoj^tion — who had emigrated 
thither at the age of eight onl}^, and whose father, 
a Dublin man, had lost his fortune in the time of 
the Irish rebellion and had come hither to mend 
the waste — not altogether with success ; but his 
son did better. He was Attorney-General of the 
State in 1810, and in Congress from 1828 to 
1835. Thereafter he went to Europe, passing 
five years there, largely in Italy, giving scholarly 
attention to Italian literature, which he greatly 
loved, and virtually discovering a portrait of 
Dante, by Giotto, which had long been lying 
perdu on the walls of the Bargello prison in Flor- 
ence. In the same spirit, he pushed investiga- 
tions about another lesser Italian poet, and the 
relations of the latter with a certain Este prin- 
cess ; all which resulted in his pleasant book on 
Tasso.* 

* Conjectures, etc., concerning Torquato Tasso, 2 vols., 
12rao, New York, 1842. 



HENRY WILDE. 



25 




From an ettgraving by Sartain of a contemporary portrait. 

As a still more rattling remembrance of this 
Georgia Congressman and scholar^ I venture to 
cite this little spangle from some of his Moore- 



26 AMERICAN LANDS &- LETTERS. 

like verse, which in its day had great popu- 
larity : 

" My life is like the summer rose 
That opens to the morning sky, 
But ere the shades of evening close 
Is scattered on the ground— to die ! 
Yet on the rose's humble bed 
The sweetest dews of night are shed, 
As if she wept, the waste to see — 
But none shall weep a tear for me ! " 

In 1844, this Irish- American poet and politician 
went to New Orleans, and died there in the plen- 
itude of his powers, just as he was beginning to 
taste the rich savors of that city of the Creoles, 
and of its winter carnivals of sunshine. 

Another Georgia name should be noted in pass- 
ing, for the tinge of realism his sketches gave to 
Southern literary work. I allude to Judge Long- 
street,* who while holding judicial positions pub- 
lished (in journals first) a rare series of life-like 
and witty sketches of the Georgia characters he 
had encountered. In later life he became a min- 

* Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, b. 1790 ; d. (in Missis- 
sippi) 1870. Georgia Scenes and Characters (originally in 
newspapers), published in New York, 1840. 



AUGUSTUS B. LONGSTREET. 



27 




From an engraving by Buttre. 



l^^aW^ ^i:^-^^^ e/^. ^^T-T^^^p^^CyC^ 



ister of the Methodist Episcopal Church;, and was 
successively President of the University of Mis- 
sissippi and of South Carolina College. His book 
may still be found in libraries — public or private 
— which have not yet tabooed the realism that 
makes the tavern talk refulgent with flashes of 



28 AMERICAN LANDS &- LETTERS. 

negro humor and hazy with the smoke of taji- 
rooms. 

From West to East. 

As for the great modern city of Chicago, in that 
decade where we stray loosely (sometimes remem- 
bering the ^teens of the century and sometimes 
overleaping into the thirties) it w^as little known 
to most peo2:»le * — especially reading people — save 
as the site of Fort Dearborn, and of a small, 
scattery, trading -post which nestled under the 
wing of its protective stdckade ; while the flat- 
lands, where now steel -tied temples (Masonic and 
other) scale the skies, showed only marshes oozy 
with flux and reflux of river and lake, where 
herons stalked and loons uttered their w^ailing 
cry. In those days, when the great Chicago could 
not count a dozen families in its population be- 
yond the scant garrison of Fort Dearborn, John 
Quincy Adams was rallying his political forces 
for that campaign against General Jackson which 

* See Long's Expedition to the Source of St. Peter s River, 
etc., 2 vols., Philadelphia, 182-i. Note, especially, p. 164, 
vol. i. 




00 



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ADAMS AND HARVARD. 31 

landed the former in the Presidential chair 
(1825). He was nearly sixty at that day, and 
wore the polish due to residence in at least four 
European courts — if, indeed, any court polish can 
be predicated of that Sage of Braintree who had 
never foregone, with all the changes in his life. 




The Old Adams Home at Braintree, Mass. 

those simplicities which had grown in him at 
the old Adams home, with its high well-sweep 
(still religiously cared for and cherished) and un- 
der the influences of that good dame Abigail 
Adams,* at whose knee he had crouched, upon 

* Diary of John Quincy Adams, 12 vols., 8vo. Edited 
by C. r. Adams. 



32 AMERICAN LANDS &- LETTERS. 

Penn Hill — on the day of the Battle of Bunker 
Hill — and watched, mother and son together, the 
ominous cloud of smoke which rose over burning 
Charlestown. 

Kirkland (John Thornton) was at the head of 
Harvard, carrjdng great dignity and suavity to that 
office, and much kindliness toward younger work- 
ers — specially that indefatigable Jared Sparks, 
compiler of the works of Washington and Frank- 
lin, and who later (1849-53) was successor to 
Everett in the j)residency of Harvard. Everett 
was then professor of Greek, keejoing alive the 
eloquent traditions wdiich had belonged to the 
brief epoch when Quincy Adams held the chair 
of rhetoric, while George Ticknor taught French, 
Spanish, and belles-lettres (1819-35). Dr. An- 
drews ]S"orton * represented the milder poetic 
graces of the college, editing with apj)roval 
an edition of Mrs. Hemans's poems (1826), and 
writing devotional verses of much pojDularity ; 
yet kee23ing his doctoral pen well-sharpened for 

* Andrews Norton, b 1786 ; d. 1852. xi Siatement of 
Reasoning for not Believing the Doctrines of Trinitarians^ 
etc , published 1883. 



GEORGE BANCROFT. 33 

vigorous — if somewhat acrid — theologic thrusts at 
such come-outers and independent teachers as 
were shortly to confront his dignity in Ralph 
AValdo Emerson and Theodore Parker. 

Foet Bancroft 

Among those at Harvard, in the first quarter of 
this century, whom the quick eye and ear of the 
scholarly Everett detected as youngsters of prom- 
ise was a certain George Bancroft,* the clever 
son of a Worcester Congregational minister, who 
had studied closely and showed a wakeful ambition 
at Exeter Academy : graduating before he had 
completed his seventeenth year, he was not slow 
to accept the advices and moneys of those Har- 
vard friends who counselled further study abroad. 
For two or three years thereafter he ranged 
through Central Europe, equipping himself as a 
linguist, and grappling, almost fiercely, with all 
opportunities that offered for either scholastic or 
social advancement. 



♦George Bancroft, b. 1800; d. 1891. Harvard, 1817; 
Poems, 1823; History of the United States (1st vol.), 1834; 
(2d vol.), 1837. Last revised edition (6 vols.), 1884-85. 



34 AMERICAN LANDS &- LETTERS. 

A longish stay at Gottingen put him upon the 
friendliest of terms with Dr. Heeren, who was 
among the first to advise and illustrate the intro- 
duction of a politico-economic bone-work into the 
old;, flaccid, and vascular masses of historic record. 
At Berlin, the young American had his taste of 
the Sunday evenings at the home of Schleier- 
macher ; carrying thence for a time — perhaps for 
all time — a more pronounced pantheistic trail to 
his theologic thought than could have thriven 
under the droppings of the Worcester pulpit 
where his father expounded. He saw the Hum- 
boldts too; encountered Goethe at his own home — 
awed doubtless, but always bumptiously Ameri- 
can ; at Rome, he fore-gathered with Bunsen, 
sowing the seed there of a life-long friendship ; 
upon an American war- vessel at Leghorn he is in- 
vited to meet Byron, and devises a swiftly follow- 
ing opportunity to call upon his Lordship at the 
Lanfranchi palace, where, by happy chance, the 
Countess Guiccioli steals in graciously upon 
their interviews. All these, and other such, made 
uncommon experiences for the son of a quiet New 
England parson. 'Tis little wonder that pulpit 



BANCROFT AS POET. 35 

engagements — to which he gave £ome attention, 
on his return in 1822 — did not enthrall him ; nor 
did a Greek tutorship at Harvard, for which he 
was booked, hold him in durance for more than 
a year. Poems were simmering in his thought, 
which found outcome (1823) in a thin volume 
dedicated to the '' President of Harvard Univer- 
sity, the author's early benefactor and friend ; " * 
the author's own wanderings in Europe get a de- 
corous setting forth in the verse ; nor is there a 
lack of Childe Harold flavors : — 

" Build in thy soul thy Paradise ; 
The world of thought is all thine own." 



* This was Dr. Kirkland, and the thin booklet came from 
the University Press of Hilliard & Metcalf . I give a frag- 
ment from its opening poem of " Expectation : " — 

" 'Twas in the season when the sun 

More darkly tinges spring's fair brow, 
And laughing fields had just begun 

The Summer's golden hues to show, 
Earth still with flowers was richly dight 

And the last rose in gardens glowed. 
In Heaven's blue tent the sun was bright, 

And western winds with fragrance flowed." 



S6 AMERICAN LANDS &- LETTERS. 

And again : 

" Farewell to Rome ; how lovely in distress ; 
How sweet her gloom ; how proud her wilderness ! 
Farewell to all that won my youthful heart, 
And waked fond longings after fame. We part. 
The weary pilgrim to his home returns ; 
For Freedom's air, for Western climes he burns ; 
Where dwell the brave, the generous and the free, 
O ! there is Rome ; no other Rome for me ! " 

Yet Bancroft was not long enamonred of the 
muse, and the little volume was presently with- 
drawn from circulation. A copy in the possession 
of the Lenox Library shows numerous interlinea- 
tions and emendations in the script of the author 
— as if he had once intended a revised imprint ; 
his engrossment, however, in those years with his 
friend Dr. Cogswell — with educational schemes, 
culminating in the establishment of the Round Hill 
School — gave other direction to his industries and 

ambitions. 

Bound Hill School, 

Dr. Cogswell * was an older man than Bancroft, 

but their common trails of Euro^^ean travel had 

* Joseph Green Cogswell, b. 1786; d. 1871. Life of Joseph 
G. Cogswell, as sketched in his Letters : privntely printed; 
Cambridge, 1874 ; edited by Anna Ticknor. 




ON K 



C/) k •- 






NORTHAMPTON. 39 

brought them into lively mental contact ; both 
had pursued studies of an omnivorous sort ; the 
elder was familiar with the English school of Har- 
row, and Bancroft had glowing memories of a 
visit at Hofwyl ; and out of their interfused ex- 
periences grew up the plan for a boys' school upon 
the banks of the Connecticut which should put 
the academies of Exeter and of Andover into the 
shade. 

The site chosen was a charming one ; Eound 
Hill, with its century-old pines and chestnuts — 
many of their giant boles still braving the weath- 
ers — dominated the pretty river town of North- 
ampton, where arching elms shaded the sleepy 
highways and where the venerable homesteads 
of the D wights, and the Lymans, and the Strongs 
diffused an aroma of respectability. From the 
hill on which stood the early and later buildings 
of this school, one could look eastward athwart 
and over the embowered town to the heights of 
Mount Holyoke ; somewhat more to the left, but 
still eastward and northward and beyond wide- 
reaching river meadows, was the gleam of Amherst 
houses and Amherst College ; while southward, with 



40 AMERICAN LANDS &- LETTERS. 

the great ox-bow bendings in the Connecticut in- 
tervening, rose the rugged cliffs of Mount Tom. 
The school territory embraced fifty or more acres 
of field, forest, and gardens, while a near stream 
(the Licking) was empounded for the diversion 
of pupils in swimming or boating. A boy might 
have his garden if he would, or his carpenter- 
bench, if his tastes ran in that direction. There 
were native teachers, specially imported, of 
Italian, of Frencli, of German, and an English 
master of deportment. Even the carving of a 
fowl and other arts and graces of the table were 
not neglected ; and on Sundays the boys in lus- 
trous toilettes filed away in military ranks to the 
Unitarian or Episcopal churches, as their home- 
breeding demanded. On festival occasions in 
summer weather they piled into great open 
coaches, and drawn by huge Pennsylvania horses, 
they carried their noisy cheer up and down the 
banks of the Connecticut.* 

* Dr. Henry W. Bellows (an old pupil) tells us that on one 
of these drives (1825) he caught his first sight of a steamboat 
— the Commodore McDonough — at Middletown. Thomas 
Appleton, too (Old and New^ July, 1872), gives many pleas- 
ant reminiscences. 



ROUND HILL SCHOOL. 41 

No wonder it was a favorite school, and that 
boys far-away sniffed the odor of its steaming 
dinners, where fellow-lads did the carving ; no 
wonder that they caught the lively rumors of those 
joyous coaching bouts, and of those great near 
woods — chestnuts among them — where red and 
gray squirrels chattered and where sometimes on 
the early snows even the wild turkey printed its 
tracks. From South Carolina came the Ilaynes, the 
Middletons, and the Kutledges ; from Maryland, 
the Gilmores, Harpers, and Merediths ; and from 
New York, the Edgars, the Newbolds, the De 
AVitts, and Van Eensselaers. Sometimes the roll- 
call reached a hundred and fifty names.* But 
the pace set was an exhaustive one ; expenses were 
heavy ; there was no endowment ; and as years 
went by there grew up a partial lack of harmony 
between the two administrators. Mr. Cogswell 

* In an old number of the Christian Spectator (January, 
1828), I find a notice of the "New Haven Gymnasium," 
projected by Sereno E. and Henry Dwight (sons of Presi- 
dent Timothy Dwight), "intended to resemble the Round 
Hill School, at Northampton, the proprietors of which, for 
having introduced the Gymnasium into this country . 
deserve the thanks of the friends of literature." 



42 AMERICAN LANDS &- LETTERS. 

had from the first represented the fatherly and the 
indulgent side of the management ; while the 
younger and more ambitious Bancroft stood for 
the discipline, for mastership, and for ceremony. 
After some seven or eight years the latter withdrew 
from the enterprise, worsted in purse and in hopes. 
A few years later bankruptcy befell the establish- 
ment, and only the imposing buildings and the yet 
more imposing forest trees in their rear kept alive 
the traditions of the golden noon-tides and of the 
crowded coaches which had made happy the boys 
of Round Hill. 

Librarian Cogsivell. 

But the career of the amiable and serene Dr. 
Cogswell did not end with the shadows which fell 
darkly upon the Northampton school. He was 
near to fifty, it is true, and misfortunes had been 
many ; he had failed in his law purposes (though 
he had studied with Fisher Ames); failed, too, in 
his home life, by the quick, sad death of a beloved 
wife — leaving a wound never wholly healed; his 
health always precarious ; directing a school of 
large repute at Raleigh, in North Carolina; invited 




Dr. Cogswell. 



DR. COGSWELL. 45 

to the presidency of another in Louisiana ; editing 
the stately and (for a time) the lively old New 
York Revieiv, and urged by Washington Irving to 
accompany him as attache to the American Em- 
bassy in Spain. He could not do this, however, 
without interrupting his assiduous nursing of the 
Astor purposes toward the founding of a great pub- 
lic library; and it was very largely through his 
courteous and persistent urgence that those pur- 
poses took effect. 

Thereafter, he burrowed in books; first in Bond 
Street, mousing there amongst dusty and cumulat- 
ing piles which threatened to bury him with their 
toppling masses ; later in Lafayette Place, the 
mania of books growing year by year and feeding 
his serenities as the j^iles lifted. He loved books — 
loved their title-pages, their dates, their colophons, 
their variety — loved them with an eager and grasp- 
ing love. A good, kindly face he had, as our picture 
will show, with a lurking shrewdness in it which 
made itself felt sharply — only in bargaining for 
a book. And whatever extended and happy influ- 
ences may grow out of the zeal of those who guard 
the present great '^United Libraries,'^ New Yorkers 



46 AMERICAN LANDS &- LETTERS. 

should never be allowed to forget that the soundest 
and most fruitful labor in the development of the 
Astor Library was due to the care and love and 
sagacity of Dr. Joseph Cogswell. 

Bancroft as Politician and Historian, 

Kor did Bancroft lose his staff of empire when the 
boys stampeded from Eound Hill. He early showed 
a hankering after politics, and was trenchant and 
demonstrative in his democratic proclivities. 

While yet planted in the mastership of a school, 
he had uttered and published (1826) a somewhat 
rampant oration on universal suffrage. But he 
had not at command the arts of popular oratory; 
his figure was not imposing; his voice, though 
strident and far-reaching, was without winning- 
ness in its tones ; and he loved always forceful and 
scathing periods rather than beguiling ones. By 
1838 he had, however, so far ingratiated himself 
with those New Englanders who marched to the 
music of General Jackson as to receive the ap- 
pointment (from Martin Van Buren) of Collector 
for the Port of Boston — an appointment that was 
historically signalized by the official presence of 



BANCROFT'S HISTORY. 47 

Nathaniel Hawthorne in the subordinate position 
of weigher and ganger. Meantime the earlier 
volumes of his history (vol. i. in 1835, vol. ii. in 
1837) have come to issue and to loud, approving 
acclaim. Dr. Heeren voiced his plaudits across 
seas from Gottingen, and Everett, in the orderly- 
pages of the Xorth American, signified the favor- 
able judgment of Harvard. There was, indeed, a 
disposition in critical quarters to condemn the 
bounce of his impetuous rhetoric. But this fault, 
if fault it were, abode with him from the begin- 
ning ; he loved heroics ; by natural bias he drifted 
away from simplicities ; sonorous and balanced 
periods, especially those with an ooze of freedom 
in them, enchained him. 

" What though thought is invisible and even when effec- 
tive, seems as transient as the wind that raised the cloud? 
It is yet free and indestructible; can as little be bound in 
chains as the aspiring flame, and when once generated takes 
Eternity for its Guardian! " (Page 112, vol. i.) 

And again he says of the victories of that first 
Revolutionary battle of Lexington : 

*' Their names are held in grateful remembrance, and the 
expanding millions of their countrymen renew and multiply 
their praises from generation to generation." 



48 AMERICAN LANDS <5^ LETTERS. 

He loved a good tail to his chapters — something 
to impress^ and give emphasis ; just as a coachman, 
proud of his conduct of a spirited team, loves to 
add eclat to his success by a good crack of his whip. 
Nor should we forget that ^tis the warmth of his 
democratic spirit which makes him boil over into 
his most exuberant utterances ; and if he catch a 
rhetorical fall, it is of tenest from an over-eager step 
in his march to the music of American freedom. 

Of the larger and. generally recognized qualities 
of Bancroft's history, of the wide and untiring 
research involved, of its' painstaking, conscien- 
tious balancing of authorities, and of the earnest, 
unshrinking Americanism which warms it through 
and through, it is unnecessary to speak. 

Mr. Bancroft was twice married ; first in 1827 — 
his wife surviving only a few years — and again, if 
I do not mistake, during his incumbency of the 
Federal office in Boston. Both marriages, as one 
of his biographers* says with a pleasant euphuism, 

* No proper or extended biography of Bancroft has been 
published. I am indebted for most of the facts cited to 
Thomas Appleton {Old and New)., Sloane, Austin, Scott, and 
Dr. Allibone, in his Encyclopagdia, or his later notes in the 
American Encyclopajdia of Biography. 



GEORGE BANCROFT. 



49 




George Bancroft in i854. 

From the crayon portrait by Samuel Laiurence (considered by Mr. J ohn C. Ban 
croft the best portrait extant of his father). 

contributed to his "happiness, and to his sources of 
material comfort/" Certain it is that the losses of 
Round Hill did not weigh permanently upon him^ 



go AMERICAN LANDS &^ LETTERS. 

nor did he ever stand largely in need of revenue 
from professional work or from his books. 

It was early in the forties that he left Boston 
and established his roof-tree in New York. For 
what cause a Harvard scholar and a Massachusetts 
man — both of whose wives had been accomplished 
and cultivated New Englanders, and who was 
himself still deeply enlisted in historic labors — 
should forego the literary opportunities of Cam- 
bridge for the surge and clatter of the Manhattan 
capital, made a puzzle for a good many inquisitive 
folk. It was a puzzle that.it would be impertinent 
in us, writing so far after date, to attempt to 
solve. Yet it may be whispered suh-rosa that 
the Democratic bounce of an office-holder under 
Van Buren would hardly serve as a very good 
flux for the interfusion of social elements in 
times when Edward Everett and John Davis * 
were Governors, and Beacon Street still bris- 
tling with its Quincy hauteurs and its old Federal 
affinities. 

* In 1844 Bancroft had good support as Democratic nomi- 
nee for GoTernor of Massachusetts, but was defeated by 
Governor Morton. 



BANCROFT AS POLITICIAN. 51 

Howbeit, Baucroft^s heart warmed toward the 
borough of Manhattan ; and for many years there- 
after, when not absent on official business, his 
home there was a centre of kindly hospitality. 

Office-holder and Diplomat. 

In the year 1845, when the Whig interregnum 
of Harrison and Tyler had given place to Presi- 
dent Polk, Bancroft was named Secretary of the 
Navy. It is doubtful if he could have piloted a 
wherry across the Hudson, but he was known as a 
shrewd man of affairs, and a worker ; moreover, 
he had only a few years before closed his history 
of Colonization* with such eloquent generalities 
respecting the slave-trade and Africans as were 
not distasteful even to those who favored the an- 
nexation of Texas ; he had furthermore won 
American plaudits by his picturesque presentment 
of the kindly Oglethorpe guiding pious Moravians 
to a home upon the savannahs of Georgia, and of 
New Englanders assisting at the fall of Louisburg, 

* Being vol. iii. of Bancroft's History of the United States^ 
published in 1840. 



52 AMERICAN LANDS 6^ LETTERS. 

and finally crowning his Yolume with that first 
glimpse (in his story of the United States) of the 
'' Widow's Son, the Virginia Stripling/' who was 
shortly to have in his keeping ^'the rights and 
destinies of conntless millions." 

Mr. Bancroft held place in the Pierce Cabinet 
for only a year, but signalized his administration 
by his advocacy and effective establishment of the 
Naval Academy at Annapolis ; and again, by such 
specific and urgent instructions to naval command- 
ers on the Pacific as made them ready to pounce 
upon Monterey and San Francisco, so soon as war 
with Mexico w\as declared.* Having given such 
pronunciamento to his Patriotism, Bancroft left 
the Cabinet to replace Mr. Everett (his old teacher 
at Harvard) as Minister to Great Britain. 

Thither he took his brusquerie, his alertness, liis 
shrewd Americanism. But wdth all his democrat- 
ic leanings and out-spokenness, he had yet a cere- 
monious courtesy with which he loved to dignify 
his intercourse with any interlocutor — an old, in- 

* Battle of Palo Alto was fought in May, 1846, and July 
18th, same year, officers of the Portsmouth raised the 
Stars and Stripes in San Francisco. 




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BANCROFT AS DIPLOMAT. 55 

herited Puritan crust of stiffness that rarely left 
him, and which bestood him well under the cere- 
monials of his mission, whether at London (1846- 
49) or later (1867-74) in Berlin. With those who 
knew him intimately, this stiffness did not display 
itself, nor was it ever offensive ; it seemed rather 
the instinctive and unconscious bristling of an old 
Puritanic virility which took on such expression 
as a Covenanter might have shown — not so much 
a combativeness as a readiness for combat, if 
need came ; just as a placable dog of good breed- 
ing will set his hirsute signals astir along all his 
spine at sound of some strange step. 

Let no one suppose that this took away from his 
courtesies, in which he was, on occasions, capable 
of outdoing the most punctilious of the Angli- 
cans. There were witnesses of his manner who 
said he had a native proclivity to sonorous com- 
pliment, to courtly genuflexions, to wary yet 
unctuous caressment of established dignities, 
whether of State or Church ; all the more re- 
markable in one who cherished beneath it the 
rank growth of an assertive and bumptious de- 
mocracy. 



56 AMERICAN LANDS &^ LETTERS. 

His diplomatic duties did not forbid attention 
to his historic studies, and the accumulation of a 
great mass of material, which — engrossed in portly 
folios — now enriches the Lenox collection. The 
first volume of his history of the Eevolution * ap- 
peared in 1850, and the others followed at uneven 
distances of time until the final volume (x.) ap- 
peared in the year (1874) on which date termi- 
nated his embassy to the court of the German 
Emperor, William I. 

During all these twenty-five years (which would 
have made a great gap in most lives, but which 
counted for far less with this veteran, who took 
smilingly the seventies and eighties that lighted 
his long career) he toiled at his history, rode 
jauntily in Eotten Kow, made a home in Wash- 
ington, and another, long cherished and loved, 
upon the clifis at Newport — where he had a lawn 
rivalling English lawns — and set his roses to bloom 
in fairer colors and with more velvety petals than 
any that ojoened under the fogs of Twickenham or 
of Kichmond Hill. He loved a beautiful rose as 

* Vol. V. of the United States History, whose concluding 
volume, X., did not appear until 1874. 




George Bancroft. 

From a photograph taken at Newport in 1884. 



GEORGE P. MARSH. 59 

he loved a sure-footed horse, or a rotund trail to 
his historic periods. 

His long life has held us to longer comment 
than is our wont ; and eyen now, as one of his 
high, rhetorical periods slips from tongue and 
memory, we seem to see that alert figure and 
good horseman, mounted in soldierly way — trim, 
erect, and with lifted head, snuffing the breezy 
air of a JSTovember morning, upon the banks of 
the Potomac or by Georgetown Heights — on his 
well-groomed horse, with a rose at the lapel of his 
coat, his eyes keen, his hair frosted with eighty 
years — riding primly and gallantly away, into 
that Past which is swallowing ns all. 

George P. 3Iarsli. 

The man we have to speak of now was not less 
learned and scholarly, but never filled so large a 
space in the public eye. Physically, he represent- 
ed a more stalwart bit of New England manhood 
than Bancroft ; his birth and bringing up were 
in the town of Woodstock, in Vermont, upon a 
shelf of hills lifting from those rolling lands 
which skirt the wooded range of a local Mount 



6o AMERICAN LANDS ^^ LETTERS. 

Tom, and whicli are laved round and about by the 
flow — gentle in summer and boisterous in flood- 
time — of a small affluent of the near Connecticut 
Eiver. His father was a large land-owner, magis- 
trate, and sturdy Puritan. The Puritan stur- 
diness the son inherited, with many yeoman-like 
qualities, and quite unusual bookish a^^titudes. 
As a boy he regaled himself with stolen readings 
of an early Encyclopaedia Britannica; nor did he 
at any age or under any circumstances outgrow an 
insatiate greed for ^Miuowing things." He had 
never any patience with dabblers or with those 
who *^ half -knew " things. This touch of por- 
traiture, will, I am sure, be recognized by anyone 
who ever encountered the stalwart presence and 
the questioning attitude which always belonged to 
George P. Marsh,* who represented our country, 
first at Constantinople, and afterward, for many 
years, at the court of the King of Italy. 

* George P. Marsh, b. 1801 ; d. (at Yallombrosa, Italy) 
1882. Best known in literary ways by his Lectures oji the 
English Language (1861), Origin and History of the English 
Language (1862), Man and Nature (1864), and by various 
addresses. Life and Letters (edited by Mrs. Marsh, 1888) 
has unfortunately never been completed. 




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EARLY YEARS OF MARSH. 63 



George P. Marsh. 

Hiram Powers, the well-known sculptor, was a 
scliool-fellow of liis, and Kiifus Choate, a college- 
mate at Dartmouth ; and in both school and 
college years his art-love and his lingual instincts 
had so developed that, at the date of his gradua- 



64 AMERICAN LANDS &^ LETTERS. 

lion (1819), lie was master of four or five languages 
— reading Homer as he read English — and had 
already furtively undertaken that hunt for lare 
etchings and engravings which in a few years 
thereafter made his collection * one of the most 
notable and valuable in America. 

But this mention does by no means fix the limi- 
tation to the quests and studies of this stalwart, 
inquisitive Yermonter : before he had reached the 
age of thirty he had reported to the legislature, by 
special appointment, on the best methods of edu- 
cating the deaf and dumb ; Jiad corresponded with 
Professor Rahn (of Copenhagen) on Scandinavian 
linguistics ; and shortly thereafter establishing 
himself as an attorney in Burlington, on the beau- 
tiful shores of Lake Cham plain, had entered into 
large schemes of wool-growing and of manufactur- 
ing ; had printed an Icelandic grammar, and had 
addressed the students of Middlebury College in 
such praise of the Goths, as exceeded as much as 
it antedated the later encomiums of the Teuton 

* A remnant of this collection is still in possession of the 
Smithsonian Institution — many of its etchings, by Diirer, 
Rembrandt, and others, being of exceptional value. 



GEORGE P. MARSH. 65 

by Professor Freeman. '^ It was the spirit of the 
Goth," he says, ^^ that guided the Mayflower, and 
the blood of the Goth that flowed at Bunker 
Hill." Meantime he is deeply interested in music 
— at one time meditating an elaborate work upon 
that subject — and again making such a homely 
and wise address upon the mechanic arts as 
prompts the mechanics and other voters of his 
region to nominate and elect him to Congress 
(1842-49). It was a cosey, modest home he held 
there (Washington), in the western part of the 
city, for many a winter ; and thither came at odd 
times Robert AVinthrop, Speaker, to talk of Texas 
and Houston ; or Rufus Choate, to chat of old 
days at Dartmouth, and of Eschines and the mar- 
vellous music of Greek vocables; or Lieutenant 
Maury, to expatiate on the sweep of ocean cur- 
rents ; or Healy, to tell his stories of contacts 
with royalty ; or Daniel Seymour, to discourse in 
honeyed, swift-flowing phrases about Hegel and 
Kant — all this at an ahvays modest table, over 
which the New England graces of a most accom- 
plished mistress presided ; and always the stout 
master flanked by a modest Bocksbeutel, express- 



66 AMERICAN LANDS &- LETTERS. 

ing his old Teuton love for the modest juices o± 
the Stein-wein. 

From this Washington home he was called 
away, not unwillingly, upon the election of Gen- 
eral Taylor to the Presidency (1849), to duties 
and delights of another sort upon the banks of the 
Bosphorus. Of these newer but always brilliant 
scenes, there are charming descriptions by Mrs. 
Marsh ; * and other descriptions, by her husband 
— of Egypt and its Nile banks and wonders, of 
Akhaban and its picturesque cliffs, of the camel 
voyagings athwart the Sinai desert, and of other 
outlying regions, subject to the Oriental monarch 
to whom the American Minister was accredited, 
and in respect to which it became his pleasant 
duty to report. Special diplomatic offices also 
gave him ambassadorial privileges on a visit to 
Athens, whence he journeyed through Roumania 
and Styria, with the opportunity of putting his 
keen eyes and his inquisitorial mind upon the 
wonders of the cave of Adelsburg. All this made 
rich forage-ground for the man of so many lan- 

* Life and Letters of George P. Marshy vol. i., pp. 152-3- 
4-6. 



GEORGE P. MARSH. 67 

guages, and so sharp and thorough in his quest 
for the proper solution of the riddles of nature. 

Home and Second Embassy. 

We may be sure that it was with reluctance that 
he turned his back upon the splendors of the 
Orient, when Russia had opened the Turkish war 
by her first cruel guns at Sinope^ and Pierce had 
succeeded to Fillmore in the Washington arena. 

But conditions were altered in America ; the 
ugly thrust and parry between slavery advocates 
and those who abhorred it^ had become more 
vengeful, and was ripening toward that stage 
which culminated in the Civil War; his moneyed 
interests, whether in lands, wool-growing, or man- 
ufacturing, were suffering grievously; there was 
quick need for somewhat which should bring rev- 
enue. Hence came those lectures for Harvard and 
Columbia resulting in his scholarly books upon 
early English literature and language ; scholarly 
and interesting, but lacking the careful synthesis 
which is apt to be lacking in works written 
swiftly, out of whatever fulness of knowledge, for 
a special and pressing occasion. He himself was 



68 AMERICAN LANDS &- LETTERS. 

never quite satisfied with these ^'chips''' hewed 
away from the tree of his knowledge. 

In Ma?i and Nature, there was enough of wise 
observation, sound reasoning, and cumulated 
knowledge for a half-dozen treatises ; but there 
was also that unstudied assemblage of parts which 
did not invite the lazy companionship and easy 
perusal of the average book-reader. In 1857 he 
was made Eailroad Commissioner for the State of 
Vermont, and treated its duties in such way — he 
says — as to bring a ^* hornet's nest about his 
ears."* All this, however, did never fully en- 
gross him or stay his omnivorous tastes and al- 
ways widening outlook. 

"What wonder if he looked longingly across 
seas to the ^gean, and to Umbrian skies and 
memories, where he had found the ripening of his 

*In his Earth as Modified by Human Action, an ex- 
tended edition of 3fan and Nature, he makes very frank 
declaration of his attitude with respect to corporations 
(p. 53, note). He says: "It is hard to 'get the floor' in 
the world's great debating society ; so when a speaker who 
has anything to say once finds access to the public ear, he 
must make the most of his opportunity. ... I shall 
harm no honest man by endeavoring, as I have often done 



GEORGE P. MARSH. 69 

book-loves with golden harvests of art ; and where 
the mellifluous echoes of Southern singers had 
lent their penetrative arias to the thunderous con- 
cert of his loved Teuton bards ? Though not a 
political worker in the ordinary sense, he had 
wrought in his way for Republican success in the 
contest of 1870 ; and scores of friends of both 
parties joined in furthering his views respecting 
new diplomatic service (the railroad people join- 
ing — it was hinted — in the urgence, through fear 
of another railroad ^'^ Report'^), and within a 
month after Lincoln's inauguration he was named 
Minister to the court of Italy. As he had left the 
Bosphorus when the first guns of the Russo-Turk- 
ish War were booming, so, now, he left Amer- 
ica on his second period of foreign service while 
the echoes of the bombardment of Fort Sumter 

elsewhere, to excite the attention of thinking and conscien- 
tious men to the dangers which threaten the great moral and 
even political interests of Christendom, from the unscrupu- 
lousness of the private associations that now control the 
monetary affairs, and regulate the transit of persons, prop- 
erty, etc., etc.," and other such matter of a sort that would 
have delighted Henry George ! Commissioners of that stamp 
are hardly permissible now. 



70 AMERICAN LANDS &^ LETTERS. 

were still reverberating along our coasts and across 
the prairies of the West. In Italy he found, 
thenceforward, twenty-one years of distinguished 
and dignified service; following the court in its 
successive migrations from Turin to Florence, and 
from Florence to Eome. His heart and all his 
mind were in the service ; the hills, the fir for- 
ests, the meadows of Clitumnus, Soracte, and the 
Campagna were all brotherly to him. 

" I have such a passion," he says (in a letter of June, 
1865, to the present writer), " for the nature of Italy, that 
I do not see how I can ever live under another sky. . . . 
Why did not Providence give us Alps and a good climate ? " 

True, he had never visited Colorado, or the re- 
gion of the Lookout Mountain : But withal, there 
is no let-up in his bold and aggressive Ameri- 
canism : 

"Our recent history," he writes in language (not gauged 
for the public eye) that should make us pardon De Lome 
for his private expression of likes and dislikes, " is striking 
a terrible blow at Europe ; and I trust I may live to see the 
playing at foot-ball with coronets and mitres, crowns and 
tiaras, which the triumph of Democracy on our side will ere 
long occasion on this." 



72 AMERICAN LANDS &- LETTERS. 

Unfortunately we can say little of that long 
period of diplomatic service ; lie wrote nothing 
that has been published ; yet what a help to his- 
tory would lie in the diary of such an observer, 
noting the progress in the crystallization of the 
popular and political forces of the Peninsula into 
a new Italian kingdom ! 

"We know that his appetite for the beautiful, 
whether in art or nature, never abated ; we know 
that an old Cromwellian Puritanism in him always 
growled (though under breath) at any invasion 
upon popular rights ; we know that tiaras and 
mitres always had a pasteboard look to him ; avc 
know that courtesy and friendliness and honliomie 
always touched him, whether in kings or paupers ; 
we know that he greatly loved to inoculate all 
open-minded, cultivated American travellers with 
his own abounding love for Italian art and Italian 
hopes ; we know that the water-flashes of Tivoli 
or Terni, or all the blues by Capri, never wiped 
from his memory the summer murmurs of the 
Queechee at Woodstock, or the play of the steely 
surface of Champlain, under its backing of Adi- 
rondack Mountains. 



GEORGE P. MARSH. ^2, 

He died in 1882 at Vallombrosa, a little conven- 
tual hamlet upon a fringe of wooded hills — rich 
in pines and firs — which skirt the Apennines east 
of Florence ; it is a place beautiful in itself, with 
its shadows of valleys and flashes of the foamy 
Vicano ; and it has a still larger warrant for em- 
balmment in all wide-ranging imaginations by that 
mention of it in one of Milton's golden lines : 

" Thick as autumnal leaves that strow the brooks 
In Yallombrosa." 



CHAPTEE TI. 

OUR story of a diplomat and historian who 
loved discipline and ceremony and roses, 
reached over a great array of years, and it seems 
only yesterday (1891) that his prim, school-master- 
ly figure went down under the horizon : while our 
good friend, the scholarly Marsh, with as quick an 
ear for musical notes as for the rugged rhythm 
of a Scandinavian folk-song — had made a goodly 
march into the depths of the present century be- 
fore he joined the army of the dead at Vallom- 
brosa. 

There were lesser men of whom we spoke ; men 
known for the virtues which distil in poems, and 
for other virtues which make other markings upon 
the sands of time. We tried to frame these sev- 
eral and briefer notices in such setting of his- 
toric or of social data as should give their subjects 

unforge table pose and place in our little gallery. 

74 



HORACE BUSH NELL. 75 

To-day our eye is fastened on the New Eng- 
land pulpit, and on the presence there (at the 
epoch we are upon) of that spiritual man of rare 
gifts who wrote Work and Play and Nature and 
the Supernatural. 

Horace Buslmell. 

I have called him* a man of rare gifts, not yet, 
as it seems to me, appreciated at their true worth 
by those who are our conventional measurers of 
reputation. 

He was born in a little village near Bantam Lake 
(in a house long since gone), not far away from 
Litchfield-Hill ; but from this home the family 
removed, when the child was scarce three years 
old, to a larger farm in New Preston, upon the 
borders of a stream that flows from Lake Wara- 
maug, and that once gave a busy "' hum '"to the 

* Horace Bushnell, b. 1802; d. 1876; was graduated, Yale 
College, 1827 ; Christian Nurture^ 1847 ; God in Christy 
1849; Sermons fo7- the New Life^ 1858; Moral Uses of Dark 
Things^ 1868 ; His Life and Letters [by liis daughter] . 
Mary R. Cheney^ 1880. The original Allihone Dictionary 
gives both date and place of birth wrongly. The Supple- 
ment gives true birth-date, but wrong place of birth. 



76 AMERICAN LANDS &- LETTERS. 

wheels of his father's fulling-mill. There, came 
about a home-spun rearing of the lad — under the 
influence of a landscape which abounded in pictu- 




Lake Waramaug. 

resque beauties, and the further influences of a 
delicate, indefatigable, spiritually minded mother 
whose '^^ gray-blue eyes"^ beamed always on him 
tenderly, whether in love or in rebuke. Memories 
of that home and of those surroundings make up 
very much of the Avarp and woof of his admirable 
essay upon the '^ Age of Home-spun.''^* For the 



♦Read at Centennial Festival, Litchfield, 1851. 



HORACE BUSHNELL. 77 

most part there was only country schooling, with 
the "^ spring ^^ given to it by a watchful and am- 
bitious parent ; while wiser economies under the 
same keen oversight gave a launch upon college 
life at Yale. 

He studied there as such eager, inquiring minds 
must, but not always in the exact lines laid down 
by the directory ; not indeed always giving full 
allegiance, but sharing, on one occasion at least, in 
a quasi-rebellion — believing that the governors by 
some decision of theirs had wronged him, and 
others. And believing thus, it belonged to his 
Puritan blood and breeding to call a halt and to 
declare for Justice. This perturbation, however, 
worked itself free — as over-shaken beer relieves 
itself by frothy output — and honors and high 
consideration were won in those college years. 

After this came a bout of school-keeping, in 
which he was not altogether himself ; his wakeful 
mind taking quick cognizance of those who were 
earnest and had germs of growth in their brains ; 
and correspondingly neglectful, nay scornful, per- 
haps, of those who could live on husks. Kindly 
patience with dulness or stupidity was, I think. 



78 AMERICAN LANDS &- LETTERS. 

never one of his virtues ; his pages shine, up and 
down, with provocatives to thought ; but nowhere 
in them do I find seductive twaddle, whereby 
sluggish minds can batten their lazy habit. 

That monitress of the ^^ gray-blue" eyes, who 
had hoped to feast her sight upon him in the 
pulpit, may have had her doubts ; for he was 
restive in religious matters in those years, '^ ex- 
pecting,'^ as he says later, '^ so intently, to dig 
out a religion by my head that I was pushing it 
all the while practically away" — (p. 32, Life). 

Yet it results as the trustful and praying 
mother had wished ; and at the age of thirty or 
thereabout — he being lithe and strong and having 
taken a novitiate of tutorship at his college — he 
begins preachment as pastor in the city of Hart- 
ford — a city where we found Trumbull and the 
others ; and a city which he was to honor and to 
make honored not only by pulpit discourses of 
high Christian and crystalline qualities, but by 
contributing through his urgence and taste to the 
outpour and the planting of rich graces of land- 
scape upon the very heart of the town. 



HORACE BUSH NELL. 79 

A Vital Preacher, _ 

It was not all plain sailing in that day in Con- 
necticut pulpits for ambitious young clergymen 
who were battling thoughtfully with theologic 
problems, and putting out their own tentacles of 
feeling into the realm of Faith. 

Beecherism and Taylorism and Tylerism — and 
I know not what besides — had their exponents, 
with such good, honest blunderbusses of Ortho- 
doxy as Dr. Hawes to fire away, scatteringly, but 
with heavy slugs, at whatsoever new light shone 
too effusively above the old pulpit cushions. 

Bushnell himself tells somewhere of his early 
experiences before yet planted in his new parish, 
and how he was toled away from the house of one 
good deacon to that of another, from fear that he 
might be impregnated with too many pungencies 
of the "New School.^' But our hero of the Litch- 
field hills was not easily impregnated ; he had 
vital ways of thinking for himself. This brought 
clamorous experiences to him and heavy pound- 
ings from associations and consociations ; un- 
der all which he carries himself with such se- 



8o AMERICAN LANDS ^ LETTERS. 

renities that even the arch-flageUants, when 
brought into open contact, express private won- 
derment that Beelzebub should ever lurk under 
such spirituality of mien. 

He loved good and true things, whether of 
doctrine or conduct, wherever he met them ; not a 
thorough-bred theologian, nor without strong dis- 
like for that way of branding a man ; struggling 
for language Avhich should so measure his faiths 
and that of others as to bind all together ; loving 
even certain Unitarian preachers in a Avay that 

made Drs. T and B' , those good haters 

of creeds which were not theirs, shudder ; but 
throughout his neighborly affiliation with the 
Boston brethren, objecting (as in his delightful 
letters to his friend Bartol) that he must keep his 
'^ Christ as man, and Christ as God — for the first 
quality to bring him near, and for the last, to give 
him power. '^ It was a beautiful intellectual proj- 
ect of his, to clothe the old technicalities and 
dogmas and orthodoxies in such new wedding-gar- 
ments of shining language as should make them 
matchable with a faith born of later and larger 
thinkings. How he scorned cant ; yet how he 




Horace Bushnell. 



After the crayo)i portrait by Roivse. 



BUSHNELUS PREACHING. 83 

yearned toward the truths which had been mis- 
clad in it for so many years of durance ! 

His old college-folk of Yale, though proud, 
were, I think, a little shy of him, and of his broad 
range ; ' tis doubtful if he could have subscribed 
to every averment of Day on the Will, or to all 
the inclusions of Taylor's Moral Government. I 
doubt if he could ever have won installation as 
religious teacher there ; yet he was sometimes 
invited to illuminate the college pulpit of a 
Sunday ; and I can recall vividly his coming, 
and his prayer, and his talk upon some such 
occasion in the old college chapel. A spare 
man — as I remember him — of fair height, thin- 
faced, with no shadow of grossness in him — almost 
the hollow cheeks of an anchorite, and with a 
voice that bore one into celestial altitudes. 

We upon the oaken benches were not great 
lovers of sermons in those days, or of preachers ; 
but here was a man whose voice and manner held 
us ; the old hymns caught a fresh meaning, and 
were lighted with a new refulgence. The pray- 
ers, too, had in them something fresh, piercing ; 
perhaps his own parish grew used to their vital, if 



84 AMERICAN LANDS &- LETTERS. 

deliberate, earnestness and pleading ; perhaps they 
took on from his own desk (after weeks on weeks) 
that dreary conventionalism which spoils so much 
of extemporaneous praying ; but to one hearing 
them rarely, this seemed quite impossible. His pict- 
uresque language, sharpened by subtle meanings, 
was like an ever-fresh and intense wrestling with 
the spirits of Evil for a standpoint in the Divine 
Presence — a logical and earnest building-up of an 
ahvays new and always easier road to Heaven, 
whereby, as on Jacob's ladder of old, angels might, 
and did, come and go, with healing in their wings. 
Then, in the sermons, there was pith ; he stuck 
to the core of things. He was outside and re- 
mote from conventionalities — so remote that you 
would hardly expect him to say a '' good-morn- 
ing '^ as other men did, but to put casual greeting 
into such fashion as would strike deeper and last 
longer ; a seer, looking into the depths that hem 
us in, with uttered warnings, advices, expostu- 
lations, tender encouragements, all wrapped in 
words that tingled with new meanings or beguiled 
one with their resonant euphuisms. There be 
preachers who tow burdened sinners with tug and 



HORACE BUSH NELL. 85 

strain into smoother, calmer water, where riding 
is easy and skies alluring ; but this man, some- 
how, without makeshift of theologic hawsers, took 
one under spiritual breezes, on great billows of 
reverential thought, into the harbor of divine 
serenities where a supreme presence reigned. 

I am puzzled in the search for some excerpts 
which may show the tracks of this man, wheth- 
er as disputant or sermonizer. In the very front 
of his defence against charges of heresy, he says : 

" It were pleasant enough to be accounted orthodox by 
my brethren, if by that means I may have their confidence ; 
but I think God will assist me, for the few years that remain, 
to suffer any judgment they are pleased to liold, if only I 
can find and maintain the truth. [And, again, from tlie same 
Christ in Theology:'] '* Nothing can be more clear, at this 
moment, than that . . . the reign of dogma, and state 
power, and ceremony, and priestly orders — everything that 
has held the organizing power [of the Church] in past ages, 
is now breaking down into impotence and passing away. 
And what shall we see in this but a preparation for the reign 
of the spirit . . . which, if it come into this valley of 
bones lying apart, and breathes into them, as the Life itself 
of God, will they not come together and live ? " 

Again, from an occasional article of much later 
date, *'Our Gospel a Gift to the Imagination" : 



86 AMERICAN LANDS &- LETTERS. 

"Nothing makes infidels more surely than the spinning, 
splitting, nerveless refinements of theology. This endeavor 
to get the truths of religion away from the imagination, into 
propositions of the speculative understanding, makes a most 
dreary and sad history. . . . They were plants alive and 
in flower, but noAv the flavors are gone, the juices are 
dried, and the skeleton parts packed away and clarified in the 
dry herbarium called theology." 

And, in the same connection, is a warm and 
gracious eulogy of Banyan — no dogmatist he! 
but one who kindles the '' world's imagination 
more and more " : 

" His Pilgrim holds on his way still fresh and strong as 
ever, nay, fresher and stronger than ever, never to be put 
off the road till the last traveller heavenward is conducted 
in." 

He never gave up the consciousness of a grand 
unshrinkable supernatui^alism compassing us all 
from the beginning to the end. Under the 
shadow, or the beams of it (oftenest the latter), 
he walked with an awed step all his life long — 
whether up the central aisle of North Church, 
Hartford, or in the blaze of his bountiful June 
roses. 



BUSHNELVS INDEPENDENCE. 87 

The Man and the Artist 

But there was much of interest in the man 
Horace Bushnell, apart from liis pulpit exalta- 
tions ; there was infinite tenderness in him ; 
gleams of it show in the familiar letters which 
color the charming biography which his daughter 
has written ; knowledge of it is, moreover, forced 
upon us by the hearty tone of the tributes to him 
from friends and companions. But with all the 
tenderness in him, there was mingled a sturdy 
manliness which demanded independent ways of 
thought and action ; he was never in any straits 
of politics, or of theologies, another man's man ; 
one could not score him down for a vote or a 
petition, except his heart and judgment went with 
it ; and when the " Association-West " of Fair- 
field or of other parts whacked at him with their 
bludgeons of disapproval, he was ^"^on guard'' 
with his fine rapier of argument, and did not 
always offer the '^ other cheek " to be smitten. 

While outspoken in his views on public ques- 
tions, he was not constituted for a good working 
politician. He couldn't combine with impure 



88 AMERICAN LANDS &^ LETTERS. 

elements, whether for backing a bad man for 
office or in shouldering up a good job for the 
print-folk of the party. He was not only, always 
and everywhere, intolerant of bare-faced dishon- 
esty, but equally so of that other insidious dis- 
honesty which creeps in the stockings of statutes 
to its quarry. 

But this fine-fibred man has not only his 
battles with Consociations and Associations — who 
would prune and adjust or pluck away his theo- 
logic plumage — he has also his battles with the 
New England climate and the winds that blow 
in March through the Connecticut Valley. Once 
strongly compacted, his studious habits have 
given growth to weakness of lungs and of throat, 
which compel rest and travel. Southern States, 
Europe, and California all give their spoils to his 
discerning eyes and his private letters (in the 
j)leasant Biographj^). 

His vocabulary, full and rich, gives him pig- 
ments of the rarest. Language indeed is a pas- 
sion with him ; and he sways its rhythmic treas- 
ures to his purpose. Music, too, impresses him in 
his moments of exaltation, as a Divine Art : 



BUSH NELL ON LANGUAGE. 89 

" Oh, if I had the voice and art of Alboni or Jenny 
Lind " [he exclaimed, in a letter to a daughter (p. 270, 
Life) J, "it really seems to me that I could make a new 
gospel of it in men's bosoms, out-preaching all preachers, 
and swaying the multitudes to good." 

There are notable things in the Dissertation on 
Language by which, on a memorable occasion, he 
paved the way to his theologic defences : 

"All words," he says, "are in fact only incarnations or 
insensings of thought." [And, again] "there is no book in 
the world that contains so many repugnances or antagonistic 
forms of assertion as the Bible Therefore, if any man 
please to play off his constrictive logic upon it, he can show 
it up as the absurdest book in the world But whosoever 
wants, on the other hand, really to behold and receive all 
truth, and would have the trutli-world overhang him as an 
empyrean of stars, complex, multitudinous, striving antago- 
nistically, yet comprehended, height above height and deep 
under deep, in a boundless score of harmony ; what man so- 
ever . . reaches with true hunger after this, and will 
offer himself to the many-sided forms of Scripture with a 
perfectly ingenuous and receptive spirit — he shall find his 
nature flooded with senses, vastnesses, and powers of truth 
such as it is greatness to feel." 

But independent of the ingenuity of his Lan- 
guage talk — as a skirmishing foil to ward off 
theologic objurgations — there is great interest and 



90 AMERICAN LANDS &- LETTERS. 

philosophic truth, in his view of language, and of 
its dependence upon the current of intellectual 
advances — whithersoever intellectual struggles 
may tend — keeping pace with them and taking 
fulness from them. Also most significant and 
truthful is his allegation that obscure language — 
that is, language heavily weighted with explora- 
tory processes of thought and struggles into the 
domain of the unknown — is not damnable per se. 
What goes after roots of things which grow out of 
the illimitable and unexplored, must be obscure ; 
what is tentative, must be different from the 
familiar ; what seeks to fathom new seas, must be 
longer than what measures the known depths. 

It is a wonderfully fine figure, where he repre- 
sents the commonplace, clear writer, as setting his 
head off in clean silhouette above a well-known 
horizon line, whereas the explorer (i.e., the man 
who would widen range of thought) carries his 
head against dim, mystic cloudland, by reason of 
which he may show vague, shadowy traits; but 
there are gleams of light, coming from beyond — in 
those shadowy traits — full of beckoning and warn- 
ing for those who are themselves eager to explore. 



B USB NELL'S ART-LOVE. 91 

Again, in more practical mood, he says : 

" Never take a model to be copied. . . . Never try to 
create a fine style. . . . But if you can have great 
thoughts, let these hurst the shell of words ^ if they must, to 
get expression. And if they are less rhythmic when ex- 
pressed than is quite satisfactory, mere thought, mere head- 
work will, of course, have its triangulations, or ought to 
have. Add now great inspirations, great movings of sent! 
ment, and these, just as long as the gale lasts, will set 
everything gliding and flowing — whether to order or not. 
But let no one think to be gliding always. A good prose 
motion has thumping in it." 

But it is not alone in language that this godly 
man is an adept. At some point in that turbulent 
stream which flows out from Lake Waramaug, he 
built, in his younger days, a dam for his father's 
fulling-mill ; and I have never a doubt that he 
matched and mated the stones of which that dam 
is built with a zeal and aptitude that should make 
it worth looking after by the curious even now ; 
and so all through life, whenever he had words 
or stones or flowers or trees to put together, he 
did it with an artist's instinct. 

He never touches Eoad-side in his discourses 
about New England but he trails after him the 
fires of autumn foliage and the glow of summer 



92 AMERICAN LANDS &- LETTERS. 

flowers. He never tires of preaching Beant}^ and 
its humanizing and civilizing influence for coun- 
try-folk. He loved trees, great and small, and 
Nature^s own verdant cloaking of the waste places. 
Country roads, as he conceived of them, should 
carry hymns and sermons and hallelujahs in their 
cedars and draping vines. One might believe that 
it would make him lie uneasily in his grave if he 
knew of the vandalism of the telegraph people, and 
the yet greater vandalism of legislators who decree 
the extirpation of skirting coppices of vines and 
plants from our road- sides. 'With what a yearning 
of the heart he would have seen this despoilment 
of the old and charming ruralities of our country 
towns ! This yearning for the bounties and the 
blessed things of Nature Avas what equipped him 
and encouraged him for that exploitation of the 
waste places in his home city of Hartford, which 
by dint of his assiduities and taste — and their full 
appreciation by the authorities — gave that Con- 
necticut city the charming little park which car- 
ries its green welcome to the eye of every passing 
traveller, and perpetuates, in the happiest and 
tenderest way, the memory of Horace Bushnell. 




a. 



CO 



N. P. WILLIS. 95 

There has been question of his statue thereabout, 
but his presence is richer than any statue, and is 
all over the place. 

A Man of Other Mettle. 

On the third floor of old North College, which 
carries homely and honest reminders of student 
life at Yale seventy years ago — there roomed in 
Bushneirs time, (1827) and over against him, in 
the northwest corner, a classmate three years his 
junior, who contrasted strongly with the dark- 
haired, independent, sturdy, perhaps somewhat 
awkward, man who hailed from Litchfield County, 
and whose career and character are sketched in 
these last pages. 

The other student had engaging ways; he had 
blue eyes and flaxen hair and a degage manner, 
which showed other associations than those with 
farmers by Lake Waramaug. He had written 
poems, too, even before his advent to college, 
which had been published in his father^s paper, 
the Boston Recorder, and thence had run, by 
reason of the picturesque qualities that shone in 
them, through half the prominent journals of the 



96 AMERICAN LANDS &- LETTERS. 

country. His Absalom^ a tender interpretation of 
the Scriptural story in mellifluous blank verse, 
had been written in his freshman year, and showed 
a grace and an unction that took it into all the 
boudoirs of the town. Such pleasant employment 
doubtless interfered with the regular curriculum of 
study, nor does it appear that he ever had large 
ambitions in that direction; a strong inclination 
for social life and its festive regalements — toward 
which his poems opened a flowery path — early de- 
clared itself in him and never had abatement. His 
diary makes note * of a collection he had made of 
French slippers, from " the prettiest feet in the 
world (known to me)." Such things do not pre- 
pare us for anything like engrossment in Freedom 
of the Will 

It is N. P. Willis f of whom we are speaking, a 
Maine man by birth, but passing his latter boyhood 
in Boston, from which centre of heretical doctrine 
(as Connecticut clergymen counted it) his father — 

* Beers' s Life., p. 52. 

f Nathaniel P. Willis ; b. 1807 ; d. 1867. Scripture Sketches^ 
1827; Pencillings by the Way, 1835-36; Letters from Under a 
Bridge., 1840 ; Life (by Professor Beers), 1885, 



A^. P, WILLIS. 97 

who was rigidly orthodox — sent him away for a 
collegiate career under the benign Calvinism of 
Yale. We cited a bit of color from his early diary; 
there is further pleasant mention of his going on 
his winter vacation (1827) to New York, with col- 
lege friends, and attending a brilliant ball at the 
home of the Mayor. On a Saturday, again, he 
goes to a fete at Dr. Hosack's ; on New Year's Day 
he calls on everyhody, in company with William 
Woolsey; dines at George Richards's* (in St. 
John's Park), 

•' had seat next the beautiful Miss Adelaide, and enjoyed 
it much. They live in the French style, and the last course 
was sugar-plums." 

There were a great many sugar-plums in his 
early career ; and some readers have thought that 
his biographer may have given undue measure to 
the exhibit of such ton-hons ; yet the story of his 
life is most entertaining, is fair, judicial, as full as 
material warranted — though hardly sympathetic 
enough to gratify the warm lovers of this master 

* Beers' s Life., pp. 5G, 57. 



98 



AMERICAN LANDS ^ LETTERS. 



of galloping prose. Few men could have written 
sympathetically of Willis. Much of his work 
was brilliant persiflage ; it shrunk under critical 
touch. Nor was it easy to sketch knowingly this 



Mo Fo WELILHS, ESQ)? 

SmLUSTKaTTE© ON ASEEJES ©IF VllEl 



^7. Ho ©AISTLETTT. 




ASCBHT TO TmE C&MTOl, 'WA§IiniS'©TOir. 
zirzBSE sitr OAazois, a -nassmoTw. jies wsanAs currat. masr. ■:!T-iasESfDTar. 

LONDON. 

StroUSHED BY dEOSOE VIBTUK 26 IV7 LANE. 

B. MABTIN fc c* ^^^r*r "TORS. 



WILLIS AS POET. 99 

poet's contacts with social life, and his ambitions 
and triumphs there, and at the same time weigh 
understandingly his higher tastes and accomi3lish- 
ments. Those accomplishments were indeed very 
real, though of a special quality. It might almost 
be said that his accomplishments undid him. In 
his latter years — for the behest of admiring 
readers — he was over-fond of always putting his 
thought (or rather his observations and sugges- 
tions) into a finical millinery of language ; charg- 
ing and fatiguing himself, to avoid plainness of 
speech — as much as ever an accredited modiste 
(who has studied colors all her life) wearies and 
worries herself to kill simplicities by the aggrega- 
tion of her tints and furbelows. 

Willis won his first trium|)hs as a poet in his 
younger years ; nor can I forbear putting on 
record this little fragment, showing very much of 
beauty and grace : 

" On the cross-beam under the old South bell 
The nest of a pigeon is builded well. 
In summer and winter that bird is there, 
Out and in, with the morning air : 
I love to see him track tlie street, 
With his wary eye and active feet ; 



icx> AMERICAN LANDS &- LETTERS. 

And I often Avatch him as lie springs, 

Circling the steeple with easy Avings, 

'Till across the dial his shade has passed 

And the belfry edge is gained at last. 

'Tis a bird I love with its brooding note, 

And the trembling throb in its mottled throat. 

Whatever tale in the bell is heard 

He broods on his folded feet unstirred, 

Or rising half in his rounded nest, 

He takes the time to smooth his breast. 

Then drops again with filmed eyes. 

And sleeps as the last vibration dies. 

I would that in such wings of gold 

I could my weary heart upfold; 

And while the world throngs on beneath, 

Smooth down my cares and calmly breathe ; 

And only sad with others' sadness, 

And only glad with others' gladness. 

Listen, unstirred, to knell or chime. 

And, lapt in quiet, bide my time." 



Journalist and Man of the World. 

After graduating at Yale (1827), Willis did some 
literary work in Boston ; at first as would seem at 
the instigation of Peter Parley, who had piloted 
so many young people over London Bridge and 
into regions remote, in shoAvy Annuals, Tokens, 
or Souvenirs. Willis also established the Aiuer- 



EARLY WRITINGS OF WILLIS. 



lOI 




N. P. Willis. 

Fro7ti a pliotografli loaned by Mr. Peter Gilsey. 

ican Monthly, wherein his falcliion of a pen made 
its first slashes at those socio-romantic problems 
which he loved. In the Annnals we find him 



102 AMERICAN LANDS &- LETTERS. 

in leash with a certain Nathaniel Hawthorne, 
whom (D. V.) we shall again encounter ; such 
names, too, as Rufus Dawes, Grenville Mellen, 
James Percival, and that of our old friend Mrs. 
Sigourney, bob up and down upon the pages 
which set forth the literary delights then in store. 
There was occasional writing by Willis for the old 
Boston Recorder — not yet so stiff with age, as 
with its moral tenets ; and possibly, also, for that 
Youth's Co7n2Janion, the lively babe of the Be- 
corder office (1827), since given up to a palatial ma- 
turity which delights myriads of young folk who 
never knew the kind rigidities of the Recorder. 

But neither tokens nor keepsakes, brim as they 
might with lush verse and luscious engravings, 
nor yet his American Monthly, did graft the orna- 
mental graces of this poet securely and growingly 
upon the Boston stock of thought. The magazine 
failed for lack of support ; and there Avas a wary, 
questioning look from under critical Cambridge 
brows at the dancing and easy measures of this 
Yale Hyacinth ; even the old Park Church, re- 
markably free from Unitarian proclivities, was 
inclined to discipline the young poet of Alsalom 



GEORGE P. MORRIS. 



103 




George P. Morris. 

From an ensravuig by Hollyer after a dra-ivhig by Elliott. 



and Hagar, who could not forego his liking for a 
good theatrical cast. 

All this ends in a divorce from Boston ; the 
moribund " Monthly/^ with a trail of Eastern 
debts, was joined with the New York Mirror, 



I04 AMERICAN LANDS &- LETTERS. 

under the shrewd directory of George P. Morris * 
who was eminently practical, both as printer and as 

song-writer. Willis 
ncA^er made a truer 
friend, or one w4io 
kept by him more 
honestly and un- 
flinchingly. An- 
other associate in 
this enterprise was 
Theodore Fay, sub- 
sequently well 
known by several 
spirited novels f and 
by a long and digni- 
fied diplomatic ca- 
reer. The new jour- 
nal, buoyant with some decided successes, dis- 
patched Mr. AVillis to Europe (1831), with a guar- 




N. P. Willis in his later years. 

Copyright by Rockivood. 



♦George P. Morris, b. 1802; d. 1864. Author of the 
favorite song, " Woodman, spare that tree ! " 

f Theodore S. Fay, b. 1807 ; d 1898. Norman Leslie^ 1835 ; 
Countess Ida, 1840; Hohoken, 1843; Secretary of Legation, 
Berlin, 1837-53 ; Minister Resident, Berne, 1853-61. 



TRAVELS OF WILLIS. 105 

antee of ten dollars per week, to enrich its col- 
umns with foreign notes ; and those foreign notes, 
under the guise of Pencilling s hy the Way, or 
InJclings of Adventure, or other such sugges- 
tive naming, are what chiefly made his reputa- 
tion both at home and abroad. They were fresh, 
piquant, lively ; there was no dulness in them, 
not overmuch reticence : he opened to the eyes of 
curious readers shows of street life, of fetes, of 
whirling coaches, of delightful interiors which 
were engaging and appetizing, and what they 
lacked in restraint, they gained in i)etillant savors. 
But he is not accredited to England alone ; as 
attache to the American Legation he has wide en- 
tree and a good passport to the jollities of the 
Continent. In the winter of 1832-33 he is ranging 
up and down through Italy, and in the succeeding 
spring boards a United States frigate, by invita- 
tion, for a Mediterranean cruise. Thereby he loit- 
ers along the shores of Sicily, of Crete, of Salamis ; 
and so, rapt in that charming idleness which be- 
longed to one voyaging on old sailing ships, and 
rioting in good breezes and sunshine, he rides up 
into the waters of the Golden Horn. Mustapha 



io6 AMERICAN LANDS &- LETTERS. 

deluges him with attar of roses, and the silken 
trousers of the Grand Bazaar rustle on his ear ; 
narghilas, spice - wood beads, and embroidered 
slippers complete the tale of delights from which 
he wends toward Syrian horizons — journeying 
with Smyrniots and revelling with Gypsies of 
Sardis. All this tinkles and vibrates most musi- 
cally from his harp of travel. 

On his return through Italy he sees much of 
Landor, then domiciled at Florence, and cour- 
teously accepts some commission from him with 
reference to a book then in course of publication ; 
and some failings or neglect thereanent, on the 
part of Willis, lead to bitter altercations. The 
American was inept at all businesses ; what could 
be done by sociabilities or kindnesses, he would 
do ; but what involved promptitude, stir, swift 
efficiency, was not so sure of being done. 

London, Oiuego, and Idleivild. 

It is in 1834 that he writes : * 

" All the best society of London exclusives is open to me 
. . . me ! without a sou in the Avorld beyond what my 

* Beers^s Life^ etc., p. 148. 



PENCILLINGS BY THE WAY. 107 

pen brings me. ... I lodge in Cavendish Square, the 
most fashionable part of the town, paying a guinea a week 
for my lodgings, and am as well off as if I had been the son 
of the President, with as much as I could spend in the year." 

Through Landor, he has come to know Lady 
Blessington^ and all the habitues of Seamore Place. 
He makes a visit to Gordon Castle, and the lawns 
and ladies, and grooms and belted earls, with their 
chit-chat, all flash into his ^^ Pencillings." He 
makes many friends in many stations ; his sense of 
the decorous is a very live and wakeful one ; Miss 
Mitford says, ^^ he is like the son of a peer ! " and 
it is certain that he had with ladies a most engag- 
ing deference and a low, caressing manner of 
speech which were very captivating. His knowl- 
edge of little convenances was all-embracing and 
never at fault ; how a hostess should carry herself, 
how she should throw the reins of talk — now here, 
now there ; how she should cover the awkward 
faux-pas of some inapt person ; nay, the very sum- 
mons to a servant or the gracious way of strewing 
a pretty dust-fall of pleading and concealing words 
over a crash of dishes, or of scandal — all this he 
ferreted and fathomed by quick social instinct. 



io8 AMERICAN LANDS &- LETTERS. 

And this instinct filtered through his published 
lines in what matter-of-fact people would call a 
pretty constant over-estimate of the exterior em- 
bellishments of life. My Lady Ravelgold's tie or 
her brodequin, or the crest upon her carriage door, 
or her smile of conge to an unwelcome suitor. 






<y^ 



^-^.-t 1/ 






Fragment of a Letter from N. P. Willis. 

would engage from him more serious attention than 
any discourse from her on poetry or on ethics. 

It was not until 1836 that Willis returned to 
America, bringing a charming and estimable Eng- 
lish lady as a bride.* The next year saw him 

* His marriage relations were most happy ; this was also 
signally true of his second marriage (to the adopted daughter 
and niece of Hon. Joseph Grinnell) in 184G. 



UNDER A BRIDGE. 109 

planted in a delightful country house in Tioga 
County, in the midst of that lovely region of 
meadows, vales^ and wooded hills, where the Sus- 
quehanna sweeps northward over the border of 
New York to gather in its tribute from the Owego 
and other mountain streams. From this home 
were written in those days his Letters from Under 
a Bridge; nor did he ever write more winning 
periods. That old word-quest (born in him) and 
susceptibility to lingual harmonies caught some- 
thing new from the bird-notes and the babbling 
streams of Tioga. I dare say there was an inapt- 
ness for farming, and a June baiting of his work- 
ing oxen '^^upon potatoes" (when they should 
have had stiffer food) ; but never did the swirls 
of the Susquehanna^s currents have a juster 
limner or the forest fires a redder blazon of 
words. 

All this, however, palls upon his travelled tastes. 
Book-making, and dramatic work, and paragraphs 
for the Mirror are done awkwardly and at arm's 
end in Glen-Mary ; so the town and its noises 
swallow him again. A wonderfully jaunty air he 
carried, moving easily, whether on Broadway or in 



no AMERICAN LANDS &- LETTERS, 

my lady^s salon ; an impossible figure (as would 
seem) for the undress of the country. 

Nor were there signs of patient labor, mental or 
physical. He ^' dashed " at things ; his intuitions 
often good, keen ; but they have presentment 
only in '^glimpses/" ^^ inklings.''^ Even his more 
elaborate tales (if the word be not too strenuous) 
are made long by aggregations ; there is no well- 
considered logical sequence of ideas or coherence — 
no dovetailing of character or of incidents. He im- 
presses one as a bird of too fine plumage for much 
scratcJimg. His best is only-^— '^^ By the Way." 

People nowadays, knowing him only by his 
tessellated paragraphs, can hardly understand how 
dominant his name and repute were in the thir- 
ties and forties ; a Corypheus of letters ! Always 
sought after as patron; always kindly to beginners, 
and ready with helping words; always cited, yet 
not noisily insistent, or placarding himself by loud 
braggadocio ; never exploiting his personality for 
business purposes ; having scorn for all vulgarities 
— even noise. There is a half quarrel with Morris 
in those days (duly mended) ; a falling off in his 
book perquisites ; a streaming-in upon his prov- 




a 
o 

3 



C 
O 

a> 

s 

o 



(U 

73 



LAST YEARS OF WILLIS. 113 

ince of newer pens and purposes ; a death (that of 
the young wife) which shakes him; a new burst of 
consoling travel — to England, to Germany ; and, 
in due time, another home, and another new and 
hapjDy domestic shrine upon a bight of the Hud- 
son — looking out upon that stretch of river which 
sweeps from West Point to Fishkill ; he called it 
^adlewild." 

There he wrought, as the years waned, and as 
the blight of ill-health slowly overshadowed him^ 
upon the familiar topics, with the old lightsome 
touches — whatever griefs or troubles might beset 
him. Sometimes breaking away again from his 
picturesque covert of a home to the wrangles and 
din of the city (in the belief that close contact 
would kindle his sleeping fancies or put nerve into 
his weakened hand) ; but at last, under the cumu- 
lating threats of disease, stealing away for final 
lodgement to his lair in the Highlands. His 
friend Morris is dead (1864); his own infirmities 
are grappling him closer ; he can no longer muster 
the kindly picturesque forces with which he had 
written out his Hints for Convalescents, or his 
Melanies of rhyme, or his Chit-chat of the hour. 



114 AMERICAN LANDS <5r» LETTERS. 

It was all ended for him (1867) ; it seemed, too, as 
if the bloody markings of the war had blotted out, 
for many a year, the roseate tracery of his pen 
and of his teeming fancy. 

Three Neiu Yorkers. 

Among other names belonging to this eiooch, 
and almost lost now, let me bring back that of the 
famous traveller Stephens,* who though bred a 
lawyer, and associated with merchants, yet told 
such stories of his wayfaring and adventures — in 
Arabia, in Poland, in Egypt, and later in the new 
regions of Central America — as to enlist thousands 
of readers all over England and America. What 
he wrote was notable, not so much for its rhe- 
torical finish as for its straight-forward, earnest, 
slap-dash way of making you know his meaning 
and share in all his joys and unhappinesses of 
travel. In later life he returned to his earlier 
business and professional associations — was active 
President of the newly laid-down Panama rail- 

*JolmL. Stephens, b. 1805; d. 1852. Incidents of trav- 
el in Egypt^ Arabia Petrcea. etc. , 1 837 ; Incidents of Travel 
in Central America, 1841. 



J. L. STEPHENS. 



115 



h 




Monument to Stephens, Chauncey, and Aspinwall at Colon. 

Front a photograph loaned by Mr. S. Demi7ig. 

road. At Colon there is a monument commemora- 
tive of this man of theodolites and of books ; while 
a giant cotton- wood is still pointed out to travellers 
over the Isthmus as ^^'the Stephens Tree/^* 



* The original lay-out of the road involved destruction of 
this tree ; but the admiration of Mr. Stephens for this Mon- 
arch of the woods was so great, that he ordered a slight 
diversion of the line. 



ii6 AMERICAN LANDS &- LETTERS. 

The name calls to mind a fellow of his in the 
Historical Society — more given to books, but 




" The Stephens Tree." 

From a photograph loaned by Mr. S. Denting: 

sympathizing in all his archa?ological quests. I 
refer to that quiet, scholarly man * who, about 



* John R. Bartlett, b. (Providence, R. I.) 1805; d. 1886 
Dictionary of Americanisms .^ 1850 (revised edition, 1877). 



CHARLES F. HOFFMAN. 117 

1840, had his book-shop under the Astor House on 
Broadway, stocked with what was best worth buy- 
ing from British publishers, and drawing to its 
shady depths such men as George P. Marsh, and 
Dr. Francis, with Mr. Tuckerman, and the elo- 
quent Dr. Hawks. This book-lover afterward did 
good service in determining the Mexican boun- 
dary ; but the work by which he is probably best 
known is i\iQ Did io7iary of A^nericanisms, a pains- 
taking and (for its time) authoritative work. 

Into that Astor store there must have gone, 
from time to time, in those days, a spectacled, 
keen-sighted man, halting a little (for he had 
lost a limb in some cruel accident), who had done 
work with Willis on the Mirror, and better work 
on his own American magazine — known, too, for 
certain novels (the Greyslaer among them) and 
known of all frolic-loving college boys by his jing- 
ling song of 

" Sparkling and bright in liquid light, 
Does the wine our goblets gleam in." 

This was poor Hoffman,* who, it may interest 

* Charles Fenno Hoflfman, b. 1806 ; d. 1884. Greyslaer. 
1840; The Vigil of Faith ^ and other Poems, 1842. 



ii8 AMERICAN LANDS 6r» LETTERS. 

the reader to know, was the half-brother of that 
beautiful fiancee of Washington Irving, whose 
death so clouded that author's early years. After 
much good and some brilliant literary work (1834- 
47) Hoffman was smitten by some mental disease, 

which involved hos- 
pital supervision ; and 
he found this under 
such kindly hands 
that he lingered for 
thirty-seven years at 
Harrisburg. I saw 
him there, in the lat- 
ter third of that long 
interval between life 
and death, his physi- 
cal buoyancy not 
broken down, living amid a great host of illusions ; 
his mind placid, but distraught. 




John R. Bartlett. 

From an engraving by Buttre. 



Southrons and Dr. Ware. 

Another author, at one time having great pop- 
ularity — who in summer days used to voyage on 




' -kA/' 




From an engravuig by Dick after the portrait by luman. 



WILLIAM GILMORE SIMMS. 121 

occasions to New York to look after the printing 
of his novels of Gtiy Rivers, or the Yemassee — was 




William Gilmore Simms. 

From a dasuerreotype. 



122 AMERICAN LANDS &- LETTERS. 

the brisk and alert Simms * of South Carolina. 
He was full of strong self-assertion, and though a 
most friendly, hospitable man, carried in his step 
and speech a good deal of the combative spirit 
and the audacities which he put so cleverly into 
the pages of his tales of the Revolution. In the 
present revival of Colonial studies we may possi- 
bly look for a new cult of the author of Melli- 
champe. 

Another strong exponent of Southern literary 
forces in that time was Lawyer Grimke,f of Hugue- 
not blood, who had been ' educated at Yale ; he 
was, in a degree, a pet of old Dr. D wight, sharing 
in some of his horse-back rides through New Eng- 
land, and paying back the attention by an elo- 
quent though somewhat efflorescent ^. B. K. 
address (1830), setting forth the superiority of 
sacred literature to either classic or scientific 
ranges of study. Nor does he omit, in those 
days of ^'^nullification," to put saving clauses of 
sound Unionism in his discourse : 

* William Gilmore Simms, b. (Charleston) 1806; d. 1870 
Lyrical Poems., 1827. The Yemassee^ 1835. 
t Thomas Smith Grimke, b. 1786 ; d. 1834. 




Thomas Smith Grimke. 



THOMAS S. GRIMKE. 125 

'* . . . If we covet for our country the noblest, pur- 
est, loveliest literature the world has ever seen, such a liter- 
ature as shall honor God and bless mankind . . . then 
let us cling to the Union of these States, witli a patriotic 
love, a scholar's enthusiasm, with a Christian's hope." 

This language would have sounded very strange- 
ly thirty years later, coming from a literary rep- 
resentative of the Carolinas ! He was radical in 
many directions ; advocating, among the first in 
America, an improved phonetic spelling, which 
would have delighted our veteran Dr. Marsh, and 
have given an academic colic to some of our 
youthful professors. He was also a non-resistance 
man, out-doing Tolstoi himself in this direc- 
tion — though his father. Colonel Grimke, had 
fought bravely and continuously through the 
War of the Revolution. A sister of this Carolina 
litterateur was a woman of remarkable energy 
and spirit, giving freedom to her slaves, and 
rivalling the most zealous of Northern agitators 
in her advocacy of general emancipation. Her 
brilliant brother died in the 2)rime of life — of 
cholera — while on some educational mission into 
the wilds of Ohio (1834), not then developed 



126 AMERICAN LANDS &> LETTERS. 

into the nursery ground of presidents and states- 
men. 

Kennedy,* of Maryland, was a genial contempo- 
rary of the last, who came to high political prefer- 
ment — a most genial, kindly man, who wrote with 
grace, and who threw a good deal of the humor 
and easy persiflage that equip Braceiridge Hall 
around his sketches of old Virginia life. 

Dr. Bird,f a physician of Philadelphia (where 
the arts of Hippocrates and of the muses seem 
easily to weld themselves) % wrote a bouncing and 
declamatory tragedy, Spartacus — made famous 
by the loud histrionics of Forrest, in the days 
when Martin Van Buren held the Presidential 
chair. He wrote also one or two romances of the 
Aztec and Mexican times, which won the high 
commendation of so competent a judge as Prescott. 

In New York — where our Northward trend of 



*John P. Kennedy; b. 1795; d. 1870. Swallow-Barn^ 
1832; Horseshoe Robinson^ 1835. 

t Robert Montgomery Bird, b. 1803; d. 1854. Calavar, 
183-i; Infidel, 1835. 

X Instance : the two Drs. Rush (Benjamin and James), 
Dr. Bird, Dr. Caspar Wistar, Dr. Garretson, and t>rs. J. K. 
and S. W. Mitchell. 





From an engra-ving by lyhelpley. 



WILLIAM WARE. 



129 



travel carries us — in those days when Miss Fanny 
Kemble had found her way thither, and when 
Forrest made the boards of the old Park Theatre 
tremble with his " Spartacus/'' and *^ Gladiator" — 





NEW-YORK 



MONTHLY MAGAZINE. 



the blue-covered Knickerbocker Magazine, with 
its Dutchman in his Dutch chair, was a fresh, 
new venture, with one of the clever Clark twin- 
brothers guiding its currents, inviting the aids of 
Caleb Cushing, of Park Benjamin, of the witty 
'^John Waters,'' and especially of that William 



I30 AMERICAN LANDS &- LETTERS. 

Ware, whom we found preaching good Unitar- 
ianism in Chambers Street to benighted New 
Yorkers — in days when Bryant was battling with 
the Post and with adverse fates. And what Will- 
iam Ware * wrote in his Letters from Palmyra 
and his Prohus is worthy of special note and of a 
re-reading. His work was scholarly and careful ; 
he deals with scenes similar to those now made 
familiar by kindred pictures in Quo Vadis, But 
Dr. Ware, with all his yividness and energy, does 
nowhere obtrude such heated exhibits of the ^'^ lusts 
of the flesh '^ as smoke and sizzle on the pages of 
the Polish novelist. 

In 1837 Dr. Ware returned to Massachusetts ; 
was for some time editor of the CMistiari Ex- 
aminer, and died in Cambridge. We shall follow 
him thither in our next chapter, on our hunt after 
that coterie of worthies who equipped Transcen- 
dentalism with its best stores, and out of whose 
teachings and stirrings of the intellectual forces of 



* Rev. William Ware ; b. 1797; d. 1852. Palmyra Let- 
ters, 1837. Prohus (now known as Zenolia and Aurelian) 
1839. 



WILLIAM WARE, 



131 



the old Bay State came the establishment of the 
Brook-Farm project, and the subsequent develop- 
ment of the old battle-town of Concord into a 




/W, '^^uz^ y 



6<_x*_^ 



/T: hrdju^ 



nursing ground for new literary endeavors; and 
finally, within times we can all remember, making 
that town the nestling-place of many of our most 
hallowed literary memories. 



CHAPTER III. 

IN an upjDer corner of one of the few remain- 
ing buildings of the ancient architectural 
regime at Yale — when there was uniformity (if 
ugliness), and where one was not disturbed by a 
variance of style, as large and multitudinous as 
the caprices of the respective builders or donors 
— we found two Seniors, of whom we had some- 
what to say. One — swart, lithe, with muscles 
toughened by exposures on the Litchfield hills ; 
the other full of easy, social flexibilities, who had 
written poetry of religious flavors and Avas full 
of the rhythmic graces that belonged to all his 
speech, and all his action. 

The first of these tAvain (Dr. Bushnell), through 
his college career, Avas a little distrustful of his 
religious stand-point, but ripened at last into a 
spirituality and an over-leap of dogmatic barriers, 

which put the watch-dogs of the Consociations in 

132 



RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 135 

a lively clamor at his heels ; but which finally — 
after an orderly life of zeal and good works — left 
behind him a track of light which outshines the 
traces of many honest but over-frighted dignitaries 
who girded at him with sharp theologic quills. 

Mr. Willis, the second of these collegians (but 
younger by some three years) scaled all the social 
heights — whether in the drawing-rooms of his col- 
lege town, or in salons beyond the sea ; found easy 
triumphs wherever he went — giving to convention- 
alities undue weight and worship — taking position 
easily at the head of the lesser belles-lettres cote- 
ries of his day, but burdening his own reputation 
by heaps of abounding Hurry-graphs, thus obscur- 
ing and blurring the delightful piquancies which 
belong to Letters from under a Bridge. 

Other names and other work — of varying im- 
portance — engaged our attention until the author 
of Prohus, with scholarly touch and guidance, led 
us back to the east winds of Boston. 

A New England Sage. 

On the south end of the block in Boston, 
bounded by Avon, Chauncey, and Summer Streets 



136 AMERICAN LANDS 6- LETTERS. 

(where Hovey & Co. now sell '^ dry-goods ''), there 
stood early in this century a parsonage-house with 
a great garden and fruit-trees around it. The 
clergyman who lived there had come from Concord ; 
and on a day (1803) when he was dining out with 
the worshipful Governor Caleb Strong, there was 
born to him a son, who was in due time christened 
Ealph Waldo.* When the son was only eight, his 
father died ; the widow, with six children, and 
shortened means, moved away from the pleasant 
orcharding the boy had known, to another and 
lesser home in Boston. Thfence the boy drove his 
mother's cow, day by day, to pasturage upon the 
common ; and he shared one over-coat with his 
brother Edward — they wearing it by turns — as 
the weather or out-of-door duties demanded. But 
such buckling with adverse fates and weathers gave 
nerve to the lad ; and when he goes to Harvard 
(1817) he is not shamefaced to be *^^fag^' to the 
President, and Avaiter at the Commons. He is 
scholarly, though he " hates mathematics ; ^^ he 

♦ Kalph Waldo Emerson, b. 1803 ; d. 1882. Nature, 1836 ; 
Poems, 1846 ; Representative Men, 1850 ; Conduct of Life^ 
1860. Biography by O. W. Holmes ; also by Cabot. 



RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 



137 




Emerson. 

Frotn a portrait by Ha7ves. 



has his period of school-keeping, and chastises a 
dolt of a boy, with only the placid utterance of 



138 AMERICAN LANDS &- LETTERS. 

''sad, sad \" Later he follows the theologic trend 
of his fathers, and in 1829 is ordained as Aid to 
Rev. Henry Ware (brother of the author of Pro- 
bus) in the old North Church. 

Of his early preaching, all accounts agree in 
regard to its charm — of voice, of homely elegance ; 
it was full of sincerity and straightforwardness ; 
'' as if an angel spoke and prayed/' said one ; rather 
ethical than devotional, but largely satisfying to 
those over-used to theologic sermonizing, and to 
a threshing of old straw. He was always search- 
ing for something winning to say, on the side 
of virtue, and of that religion which grew out 
of a recognition of the kindly fatherhood of 
God. 

But he does not keep a pastorate. There is a 
chafing under the harness ; somewhiles a suspicion 
that his conventional utterances in prayer are not 
earnest and true, but carry a taint of hypocrisy in 
them ; again, there is a doubt as to his practical 
efficiencies ; once — the well-authenticated story 
runs — he is summoned for consoling offices to a 
brother of the Church in articulo mortis ; know- 
ing nothing of his past history or habitudes, he 



EMERSON AS PASTOR. 139 

hesitates, he falters, in such way that the dying 
parishioner broke out — fuming — "^^Yonng man, 
if yon don't know yonr duty, you had better go 
home ! " The largest duty in his eye, was to be 
truthful and honest ; he revolted at the "• official 
goodness '^ of the ministerial office. * 

Again, there was something in the administra- 
tion of the rite of the Communion which made 
him halt ; there was question in his subtle mind 
of its authorization ; perhaps a question of its 
efficiency — no matter which ; his mind was 
brought to pause ; and the pause brought doubt 
and abstention ; so comes a severance of Church 
ties, but no loss of benignity or kindliness on 
either side. 

I find it hard to imagine him trying to accom- 
modate his doctrine to the approval of this or that 
deacon, or of this or that consociation or synod. 
In fact, non-conformity was an early-growing and 
very pronounced quality in him. He could hardly 
have been other than a non-conformist, in what- 
soever church he had ministered. 



Cabot, vol. i., p. 164. 



I40 AMERICAN LANDS &- LETTERS. 

A pleasant little drift of European travel comes 
next (1833) into the life of our Sage^, in the course 
of which we hear him lifting up his voice over the 
hard heads of Scottish listeners in a Unitarian 
chapel of Edinboro ; and more noticeably, we hear 
him talking — half the night through — with Car- 
lyle, at that master^s early home of Craigenputtoch, 
where Jane Welsh (after six years of wifehood) 
was chafing at the solitude, and welcoming the 
'^ angel visitor" while the winds of Dumfries 
whistled over the waste. It would have been 
worth somewhat to listen to that notable Craigen- 
puttoch talk ; — the young American zealot, wor- 
shipful, an old admiration gleaming in his eyes, 
yet full of probing, and testing queries ; while the 
shaggy, keen-sighted Scot — curiously charmed by 
this sleek serene young New England er — parries 
his inquisitive thrusts at mysteries, and plants his 
square blows at the Sect-ism (whether Calvinistic 
or other) whose votaries are clad in strait-jackets, 
and that would put its own limitations upon the 
large, dominating Divine effluence — all about us 
and in us — and which withers theologic dogma 
as in a furnace. Yet that visit to Oraigenputtoch 



EMERSON AT CONCORD. 141 

was the germ of a great friendship, whose issues 
are in a charming book * fronted by the best por- 
trait of the querulous Scot that I know. 

There was not much preaching after Emer- 
son's return, until he opened upon his career of 
lay-preaching, with head-quarters at Concord. 

Emerson at Concord. 

Those head-quarters were at the first m the old 
parsonage which his grandfather had built in the 
latter half of the last century — not many years 
before the famous Concord fight (April, 1775), of 
which the monument now gleams through the 
trees a little way westward of the parsonage. That 
grandfather Emerson who built the house was 
scarce thirty-two when the Concord battle befell ; 
and he was plucky as well as prayerful ; would 
have gone himself to the fight by the bridge if his 
zealous jiarishioners and his young wife would 
have permitted. Next year, however, this militant 
parson broke away from bonds, enlisted for the 

* The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph 
Waldo Emerson^ 2 vols. Boston, 1883. 



142 AMERICAN LANDS &^ LETTERS. 

march to Ticonderoga, but falling ill by the way, 
died in Vermont (1776). 

The widow two years thereafter was wooed and 
won by the new minister * to the Concord parish, 
who kept the parsonage awake to its wonted offices 
for over thirty years — preaching his last sermon 
when over ninety. It was to the home of this 
veteran preacher and teacher that Kalph Waldo 
Emerson came in 1834 to meditate — to roam by 
the leisurely flowing river which skirted the or- 
chard of the house, and to put into its final shape 
his first little '*^ azure" book on Nature. There 
too — as we shall find presently — came, after the 
death of the old incumbent, another newly mar- 
ried young writing man who was to make all 
memories of the place forever green by his Mosses 
from an Old Manse. 

Carlyle called Emerson's Nature azure colored 
— perhaps from its first binding ; perhaps, too, by 
a stroke of poetic finesse, characterizing the book 
as tearing open great rifts in the clouds that com- 
monly beset us, and bathing our spirits in the 
" blue ** beyond. However this be, there seems 
* Rev. Ezra Ripley. 



EMERSON'S ''NATURE," 143 

to be something delightfully qualitative in the 
word — as if the " azure " with all its reaches and 
its mystery, were not only hemming ns in, while 
we read, but penetrating and baptizing us. 

That book of Nature has perhaps more of logi- 
cal form than his later writings ; scholastic meth- 
ods — of thirdlys and fourthlys — not yet given 
up, and he trying hard to measure his observations 
or reflections by rulings of teachers. All these he 
left ; not with spurning, not with scorn, but by 
inevitable growth away from them : the cork- 
jacket of the schools trailed by him loosely till 
his own active buoyancy made him unobservant 
of the loss when it fell away and drifted behind. 

But even thus early his later fashion of seer- 
ship declares itself ; and his most haunting words 
are those which have no envolvement in pre- 
scribed ranks, but blaze out with singleness of 
flame. Thus, in his very first chapter — 

" If a man would be alone let him look at the stars." 
"In the presence of Nature, a wild delight runs through 
the man in spite of real sorrows. ... In the wilderness 
I find something more dear and connote than in streets or 
villages. ... Its effect is like tliat of a higher thought, 
on a better emotion coming over me, when I was thinking 



144 AMERICAN LANDS &- LETTERS. 

justly or doing right. . . . [Again] To a man laboring 
under calamity, the heat of his own fire hath sadness in it. 
There is a kind contempt of the landscape felt by him "who 
has just lost by death a dear friend." 

Yet again in pretty tracery of words which loop 
together engagingly his mystic revels of thought — 

" In other hours, Nature satisfies the soul purely by its 
loveliness. ... I have seen the spectacle of morning 
from the hill-top over against my house, from daybreak to 
sunrise, with emotions which an angel might share. The 
long slender bars of cloud float like fishes in the sea of crim- 
son light. From the earth as a shore I look cut into that 
silent sea. I seem to partake ' its rapid transformations : 
the active enchantment reaches my dust, and I dilate and 
conspire with the morning wind. . . . Tlie dawn is my 
Assyria ; the sunset and moonrise my Paphos, and unim- 
aginable realms of faerie ; broad noon shall be my England 
of the senses and the understanding ; tlie night shall be my 
Germany of mystic philosophy and dreams." 

Early Exjieriences and Utterances, 

This earnest worshipper of the benignities of 
nature had gone through sobering experiences of 
life before he was permanently established in a 
Concord home ; that brother Edward — with whom 
he had shared an overcoat against the east winds 



EARLY EXPERIENCES. 



145 




Emerson at His Desk. 



of Boston — liad died on a health-trip to Porto 
Rico (1834) ; the young wife of Emerson, after 
less than three years of wedded life (1829-32) was 
dead ; so Avas the hrother Charles of whom he 



146 AMERICAN LANDS &* LETTERS. 

speaks so glowingly and so plaintively in the 
Carlyle Correspondence.* But the skies color 
kindly to him ; the loitering rivers of Concord 




Emerson's House at Concord. 



brought peace ; and the gentle hill-slopes, topped 
with pine-trees, gave winning shelter. 

It was in 1835 that he married again f and 



*Vol. i., p. 96. 

t His second wife was Miss Alida Jackson, sister of Dr. 
Jackson, so well known in the history of anaesthetics. 



HIS HOME. 



147 



bought that plain, square house * on a fork of the 
village streets, which was ever after his home ; 
here (he says in a letter to Carlyle) : 

"I occupy, or improve^ as we Yankees say, two acres only 
of God's earth, on which is my house, my kitchen garden, 
my orchard of thirty young 
trees, my empty barn. . . . 
Besides my house, I have, 
I believe, $22,000, whose 
income in ordinary years 
is six per cent. I have no 
other tithe except the in- 
come of my winter lect- 
ures, which was last winter 
$800 (1837-38). . . . 
My wife Lillian is an incar- 
nation of Christianity ; my 
mother whitest, mildest of 
ladies, whose only excep- 
tion to her universal prefer- 
ence for old things is — her 
son — my boy, a piece of 
love and sunshine. . . 

These and three domestic women who cook and sew and run 
for us, make all my household. Here I sit and read and 




A Corner of Emerson's Study. 



* The original building was virtually destroyed by fire 
many years later, but rebuilt by his friends with such 
scrupulous fidelity to the old lines, that its identity seemed 
hardly broken, 

lO 



148 AMERICAN LAXDS &- LETTERS. 

write, with very little system, and, as far as regards composi- 
tion, with the most fragmentary result : paragraphs incom- 
yressible^ each sentence an infinitely repellent particle." 

I have ventured to italicize these declaratory 
phrases by which he honestly sets forth a good 
many of the reigning qualities which belonged to 
his address On the American Scholar, and that 
other of the following year (1838) which, on a 
certain August day — when the^ ^' air w^as sweet 
with the breath of the pine and the new hay '^ 
as it drifted into the windows of Divinity Hall 
in Cambridge — broke down with its pellets of 
thought the old tranquillities of the place. 

I remember well how the echoes of that talk to 
Divinity students came eddying over the quiet 
latitude of New Haven, challenging eager young 
thinkers to a strange unrest, and inviting the 
heartiest maledictions of orthodox teachers, who 
would consign this audacious talker to quick ob- 
livion.* There was not, indeed, in the address 

* It IS noteworthy that the American Biographical Diction- 
ary of ]^r. William Allen — of which revised editions ap- 
peared in 1832 and again in 1857 — though containing notices 
of Rev. William Emerson and other ancestors — has no men- 
tion of Ralph Waldo Emerson. 



THEO LOGIC BELIEFS. 149 

special reverence for those who had denoted the 
Infinite power as being of a Triune nature — or 
of a single nature — or yet, of that multiple nature 
which had made old mythologies rhythmic with 
stories of groups of gods, and set its wood nymphs 
(for angels) in the vales where fountains burst 
forth ; not reverent indeed of any one of the old 
arithmetical summings-up of Divinity. Yet there 
was in Emerson — in that day and always — a deep- 
seated, throbbing recognition of a Deity — imma- 
nent, wise, merciful — flinging all abroad blessings 
in flowers and sunshine ; and there was in this 
man, too, a quiet, earnest seeking after those 
mystic ties of relationship which would make His 
Fatherhood clearer and nearer. 

We have no right, however, to make strong 
declaratory phrases about Emerson's beliefs ; if his 
own utterances do not suffice no words can. And 
in this connection I am tempted to question if 
that delightful biography of Emerson (by Dr. 
Holmes), was -committed to the properest hands. 
A lithe and witty Montaigne cannot measure for 
us a broad-shouldered Plato ; he is too much, and 
too buoyantly himself to write the life of another. 



ISO AMERICAN LANDS &^ LETTERS. 

Scarce does the pleasant doctor begin his delight- 
ful task, but his own piquant flavors, queries, and 
humor, bubble up through all the chinks of the 
story and make us forget the subject — in the nar- 
rator. A man who is so used to drawing attention 
to his own end of the table, cannot serve safely 
as a pointer at some one else. 

Emerson was pure in thought as he was high in 
thought, and his thought often reached spiritual 
altitudes where even the front rank of preachers 
never climbed : hence there was lacking that high 
fellowship which might have strengthened and 
stayed him, and the Avant of which sometimes 
broke over him with a blighting sense of lone- 
liness. 

The Eev. Henry James (father of the better- 
known H. James, Jr.) talks in connection with 
Emerson — about his ^*^prim and bloodless friend- 
ship.^' But James — with the warmth of the '*New 
Jerusalem '^ in him — craved sympathetic speech 
in those who talked theologies with him — a most 
acute, eager man with transcendental ranges of 
thought. The estimate agrees with that of many ; 
few could get near Emerson ; the marchioness 




Emerson in 1847. 



EMERSON AT *'MASS." 153 

Ossoli never ; Hawthorne never ; James never ; an 
implacable acquiescence closed the doors between 
him and very many earnest talkers. He says in 
his journal* (1837): "I approach some Carlyle 
with desire and joy " . . . but it ends with 
. . . " only so feeble and remote action as read- 
ing a Mirabeau or a Diderot paper." And again, 
" most of the people I see in my own house, I see 
across a gulf." 

About the weather, or his neighbors' pigs, or 
Thoreau^s bean-patch, he could warm ; but if one 
dropped such topics for talk about the soul, or 
immortality, he froze ; on such trail his thought 
was too intense for any '' battle-dore and shuttle- 
cock " interchange of phrase. 

It would be a mistake to suppose that he had 
not his saltations of belief on grave as well as 
minor subjects. He goes on one occasion to High 
Mass in Baltimore ^'with much content." '' ""Tis 
a dear old church f," he says, ^^ the Roman, I 
mean, and to-day I detest the Unitarians, and 
Martin Luther, and all the Parliament of Bare- 

* P. 359, Cabot. 

fin letter to Miss Fuller, p. 471, Cabot. 



154 AMERICAN LANDS &^ LETTERS. 

bonps/^ He asks Thoreau to teach him deft use of 
a hoe — finds soothing in it ; but 

" the writer shall not dig. To be sure he may work in the 
garden, but his stay there must be measured, not by the needs 
of the garden, but of the study." And again (to Miss Ful- 
ler) " when the terrestrial corn, beets, and tomatoes flourish 
the celestial archetypes do not," [He writes to his brother 
William,] "I am a little of an agrarian at heart and wish 
sometimes that I had a smaller house or else that it sheltered 
more persons." * 

In the spirit of the last pronunciamento he sug- 
gests that all his household shall eat together. 
The cook declines ; but the maid accepts — for 
one day — after which she declares that she can- 
not allow the poor cook to dine alone. Under 
such experience there comes to the front that 
notable project of Brook Farm (1840). Will he 
join ? He queries — is half inclined — but says 
(in a letter to Miss Fuller) ^'^at the name of a 
society all my repulsions play, all my quills rise and 
sharpen, I shall very shortly go, or send to George 
Kipley my thoughts on the subject.'''' f 

* Cabot, pp. 445-450. t Ibid., p. 434. 



BROOK-FARM AND CONCORD. 



155 



George Ripley and Brook Farm, 

The liveliest instigator and most earnest sup- 
porter of the Brook-Farm experiment was the Rev. 

George Ripley, a native 
of Greenfield, in the 
Connecticut Valley, 
who as a boy had lived 
for a time at that Old 
Manse where we found 




Emerson. And this lad 

— afterward so identi- 
fied with the transcen- 
dental lines of thought 

— we find, oddly 
enough, pleading with 



156 AMERICAN LANDS &- LETTERS. 



his mother (1819) for leave to complete his educa- 
tion at Yale instead of Harvard. " Languages/' he 
says^ *'^are better taught at the last, but solid 
branches, science and the like,* as well, if not 
better, at Yale, where temptations incident to a 
__j college life are fewer.'' 

His wishes are over- 
ruled, however; he is grad- 
uated (1823) at the head of 
his class ; takes his Divin- 
ity lessons ; has church in 
Boston, but is not elo- 
quent ; had never the gift 
of public speaking ; ad- 
mires greatly C banning 
and Theodore Parker ; is 
deeply inoculated by the famous Divinity Address 
of Emerson, and abandons the pulpit to preach and 
illustrate the gentle ways of a Christian life by the 
Idyllic peace and brotherhood of Brook Farm. 




George Ripley. 



* George Ripley, b. 1802 ; d. 1880. Associated with 
Charles Dana in editorship of Appleton's CydopcBdia^ 1857- 
63. Literary Critic of New York Tribune, 18-19-80. Life 
by Octavius Frothingham : American 3Ien of Letters. 







CQ 



O 

o 

Cu 






BROOK-FARM. 159 

It was not an over-attractive place — nine miles 
away from Boston — near to AYest Eoxbary, and 
not far from that great lazy looplet which, the me- 
andering River Charles makes, near to Dedham — 
whence it flows northwesterly past Upper and 
Lower Falls and round Mount Auburn into the 
placid reaches that Longfellow mirrored in his 
verse, and then other and lower placid reaches 
which Holmes saw from his Boston windows, and 
gloried in. The farm was not fertile ; it did not 
promise large practical results ; there was no 
water-power in the little branchlet of the Charles 
(in whose eddies poor Zenobia may have met her 
death). But there was contagious cheer and en- 
thusiasm in the leader, whose kindly eyes had 
twinkled with large hopes at the gatherings of the 
Transcendental Club — who believed that 'Hhe 
hag-like scholastic theology of old had given up 
the ghost " — and who wrote proudly to inquirers 
about the new Roxbury scheme — 

"We worship only reality, we are striving to establish a 
mode of life which shall combine the enchantments of poetry 
with the facts of daily experience." [And again, later:] 
" The path of transition is always covered with thorns and 
marked with the bleeding feet of the faithful, ... We 



i6o AMERICAN LANDS &- LETTERS. 

must drink the water of Marah, tliat others may feed on the 
grapes of Eshcol. . . . AVe are eclectics and learners ; 
but day by day increases our faith and joy in the principle of 
combined industry, and of bearing each other's burdens, in- 
stead of seeking every man his own." * 

These were brave words, and believed by those 
brave leaders Mr. and Mrs. Eipley in every fibre 
of their being ; though the " bleeding feet '' must 
have attached to some period when funds were low 
or potatoes rotting in the ground ; for Avith all the 
joyousness and charm (to which old residents 
testify) and the music, and the dances at the Eyrie 
and the pretty tunics, and such songs as " Kath- 
leen Mavourneen '' from the jubilant voice of 
young George Curtis, and an old-fashioned farmer 
for teamster — there was not that close business sys- 
tem which could promise large economic results, f 

There was a merging of simpler aims — as years 

* Frothingham, Life, pp. 146-48. 

f The original capital of the Brook Farm Institute of Agri- 
culture and Education, was $12,000 (in shares of $500), 
of which George Ripley took three : Mrs. Ripley and Miss 
Ripley five : Hawthorne two ; Charles A. Dana three. The 
association guaranteed to each shareholder five per cent — 
which was made good until disaster befel (18-17). Yid. Froth- 
ingham and Brooli Farm Memoirs by Codman. 



PHALANSTERY BURNED, i6i 

went by — in more ambitions Fonrierite projects : 
the bnilding of a great Phalanstery — in the 
smoke and flame of whose burning (1847) this 
grand philanthropic scheme went down. It was a 
great grief for the founder. The Harhinger, a 
journal which had budded under the West Rox- 
bury nursing, was kept alive for a few years more 
— in Flushing, or New York — whither the Archon 
(Ripley) went : another and quieter career opened 
for him — of which traces are to be found in the 
critical columns of the Tribune : his widowed years 
were brightened by second marriage rites ; and to 
the last there was a merry twinkle under the 
gold-bowed spectacles of Dr. Ripley. For all 
this I think the Brook-Farm failure left a sore 
place in his heart. Later reform projects seemed 
to him, I feel sure, artificial, dishonest — as com- 
pared with that first out-put of the seeds of justice 
and brotherhood ; always (for him) there was a 
rhythmic beat of celestial music in that far away 
choir of workers and singers — brought together 
by his agency, bonded by his affectionate sereni- 
ties, and put upon the road — amidst rural beati- 
tudes — toward the Delectable Mountains and the 



i62 AMERICAN LANDS &> LETTERS. 

heights of Benlah. I don't think such retrospects 
of heavenly tone and tune ever took the distin- 
guished editor of the Su)i back to the courts of 
the ^' Hive" or to the shops of West Roxbury. 

If an honest pure-thoughted man ever lived 
•'twas George Ripley ; and he carried a beautiful 
zeal and earnestness into that Brook-Farm under- 
taking. Much as he enjoyed the genius of Haw- 
thorne. I do not think he had kindly thought of the 
BUfliedale Romance: not indeed blind to its 
extraordinary merit, or counting it an ugly pict- 
ure — but as one throwing a quasi pagan glamour 
over a holy undertaking. I remember once ask- 
ing him — in that dingy Tribune office — after 
the religious tendencies, or utterances of Haw- 
thorne in those Brook-Farm days : he said, bluntly 
— ^^ there were none — no reverence in his nat- 
ure.''^ Very likely he would have hesitated before 
putting such critical opinion into cold type. But 
I could see that old memories were seething in his 
thought, of that large humane purpose into which 
he had put his heart and his hope, and whereon 
the great Romancer had put only his artist eye. 



D WIGHT AND DANA. 



165 



Otlier Brook- Farmers and Sympathizers. 

There were others whose hearts were in it ; 
among them that musically accented man, John 
S. Dwight. whose Journal of Music was a legacy 




John S. Dwight. 

for the nation. Charles Dann, too — not long 
from his two years at Harvard — pnt as much 
heartiness as belonged to any work of his, into his 



l66 AMERICAN LANDS &- LETTERS. 



foregatherings there with his pupils in Greek or 
German ; with a quick eye for trees even then, and 
prompt and business-like at twenty-three — as al- 
ways afterward. The 
tall W. H. Channing 
— son of Dr. ATalter, 
and nephew of the 
great expositor of 
Unitarianism — pictu- 
resque with his long, 
curling hair and gra- 
cious smile, had his 
kindly admonitions 
and encouragements 
to give. And Haw- 
thorne — if not hearty 
in the regenerative 
work — put a swift and 
firm hand into the farm 
labors, what short time 
he stayed ; but it is 
easy to imagine his un- 
rest and lack of assimilation on those evenings at 
the " Hive," when the younger members, in gay 




Wm. Henry Channing. 

From a photograph loatted by Thomas 
Wentworth Higginsoft. 




t3 
I 

O 



O 

o 

OQ 



THEODORE PARKER. 169 

tunics, organized recreative dances ; or when tlie 
poetic Crancli * entertained the assemblage with 
his wonderful imitations of beast and bird notes ; 
or when the boyish Curtis (scarce turned of seven- 
teen) lifted up his melodious voice to some old 
song of love or of pathos. 

Mrs. L. Maria Child, f kindly hearted, and 
author of much pleasant reading, sometimes lent 
her benign presence — though comparing unfavor- 
ably the i^eaceful ruralities and voices of Brook 
Farm with the scalding words of the Emancipator, 
or of her own Anti- Slavery Standard. 

Tivo Doctors. 

Theodore Parker J; was another well wisher, who 
came over from time to time, across lots, from his 
near parish in AVest Koxbury, and who would have 

♦ Christopher P. Cranch, b. 1813; d. 1892. Well known 
for his various gifts — as Landscapist, Poet, and Virgilian 
translator. 

tMrs. L. Maria Child {nee Francis), b. 1802 ; d. 1880. 
The Rebels^ 1822 ; Looking Toward Sunset, 1864. 

|: Theodore Parker, b. 1810 ; d. 1860. Discourse on Mat- 
tel's PeHaining to Religion, 1842. His Complete Works (12 
vols. Svo) edited by Cobbe, 1863-65. Life by Frothingham. 



I70 AMERICAN LANDS &^ LETTERS. 




Mrs. Lydia Maria Child. 
put more of bounce and of fight into these regen- 
erators of society — had he been made director. 
He was a man of force ; had worked his way 



THEODORE PARKER, 171 

through college ; held a brain that loved to 
grapple with difficulties — whether lingual or 
logical. He also had a tremendous balance of 
common sense ; his Dietary or Cano7is of Self- 
Discipline shows this. 

He was tabooed by his fellows in the Church 
who kept within the straits — laid down by An- 
drews Norton and others — and felt it grievous- 
ly, but not repiningly. He always liked a good 
battle ; would have fellowshipped admirably with 
those pulpit adherents of Cromwell who kept their 
maces or pistols within arm^s reach — even in the 
pulpit. The elite of society were always shy of 
him. He was not amenable to high social law. 
Edward Everett or Prescott, or other such would 
have been shocked in all their genteelest fibres at 
the spectacle of a man in careless or disordered 
toilette — without surplice or other appliances, or 
air of stately decorum — thundering from the plat- 
form of a Music Hall, about the Eternal Father — 
as if he knew him ! Not all the beneficence and 
-charity that shone in his life could blind them to 
his democratic commonness of talk. From first to 
last the cultivated and refined of Boston held 



172 AMERICAN LANDS ^ LETTERS. 

themselves aloof. They might admire, but they 
resented his lack of respect for proper formulas of 
conduct ; and to their ears his weightiest thunders 
of damnation — Avhether of a Mexican war or a 
fugitive slave law — were vulgar thunders, and 
ugly brimstone odors hung nauseously about the 
theologic or the humanitarian lightnings of the 
Odeon, or of Music Hall. Yet he had fathomed 
all social depths in all ranges of life. In real 
friendliness — of intention or of speech, he could 
give points to kings and outdo them. As for his 
intellectual resources, they were prodigious and 
imposing ; but they had serious flaws. In what 
touched humanitarian questions, he reasoned — 
with his heart ; his tenderness over and over, up- 
set his logic ; his tears put a mist into Jiis j^leas 
even at the Court of Heaven. Again, his sharp, 
keen memory for particular facts made him neg- 
lectful of accepted and accredited records ; he had 
exaggerated trust in himself, in his instincts, his 
memory, his purposes. He looked down on most 
men ; he had his slaps for Paul the Apostle — as 
for an over-confident boy ; he looked up to none 
— save God. 




Theodore Parker. 



THEODORE PARKER. 175 

"I should laugh outright " [he says in his journal], "to 
catch myself weeping because the Boston clergy would not 
exchange with me ! " [And again, in a sermon of May 19, 
1841 :] "Alas for the man who consents to think one thing 
in his closet and preach another in his pulpit ! . . . Over 
his study and over his pulpit, might be writ Emptiness J** 

He was condemned and scouted by most conven- 
tional preachers ; even Channing looked upon him 
askance ; Bartol doubted, but befriended him ; 
many shied away, murmuring " Infidel ! " Hard 
words he often dealt back ; a fighter full of zeal 
and earnestness ; eyes wide open — though peer- 
ing through great round glasses ; soul wide open, 
too — but stormy. He thought, may be, more 
largely of his endowments and capacity than the 
world has thought ; holding his talent — not in 
a napkin — but astir for Code's and man^s ser- 
vice. So he fared through a short, but very full 
life — not without angry words and tempests of 
pitying tears and bitter maledictions of wrong- 
doers — dying at last as a child dies, in Florence 
(1860). 

Another extraordinary but older New England 
Doctor of Divinity, who may sometimes have 
brought his penetrative and not unsympathetic 



176 AMERICAN LANDS b^ LETTERS. 

look upon the Brook-Farm company, was Orestes 
Brownson.* He was a Vermonter, whose father 
died in his childhood, and he was reared under 
the severe Puritan discipline of elderly relatives. 
After a youth of struggle, he became preacher — 
first of Presbyterian faith (1822), and later sway- 
ing into Universalism (1825) ; again he was an ad- 
mirer of Robert Owen, and instrumental in form- 
ing a 'MVorkingman's Party ^' (1828) ; four years 
thereafter he was a good Unitarian and in 1844 (if 
not earlier) protested against Protestantism, and 
entered the Romish Church. But even here he 
lacked due obeisance to those in authority, and 
became an unruly member. Throughout, he was 
active in political discussion ; oftenest radical, but 
at times severely conservative ; writing sharply 
and strongly in journals of his own establish- 
ment ; always trenchant in S23eech — always va- 
grant in thought : a strong, self-willed, and curi- 
ous Vermonter ! 

* Orestes A. Brownson, b. 1803 : d. 1876. In 1840 pub- 
lished Charles Elicood., or the Infidel Converted. Essays and 
Reviews^ 1852; complete Avorks number 19 vols. 



MARGARET FULLER, 



177 



Fuller-Ossoli. 

Another interested looker-on^ and sometime 
participant in the entertainments of Brook Farm, 
was Miss Margaret Fuller,* daughter of a slirewd, 
headstrong, Jeffersonian 
member of Congress 
(1817-25) and of a gentle 
mother who loved flowers ; 
Margaret pined for some- 
thing more than flowers. 
At six she studied Latin, 
at fifteen her tasks were 
in French, music, mental 
philosophy, — with two 
hours a clay to Italian ; 
other stray hours were given to Diary- writing, 
and to ^'compositions," which were full of pre- 
cocities of form and thought. The father meant 




Margaret Fuller. 



♦Sarah Margaret Fuller (Marchioness Ossoli), b. 1810; 
d. 1850; edited The Dial^ 1840-42; Woman in the Nineteenth 
Century^ 1845. There is a very good and sympathetic 
life of her by T. W. Iligginson — but not without a certain 
literary arrogance by which he sublimates his otherwise 
pleasant essays. 



178 AMERICAN LANDS &- LETTERS. 

her to shine, and schooled her captiously — even 
to the lacing of her corsets, and the colors of 
her robes. Over and over, her own will ran against 
that exacting father's will ; yet she grew like him 

— far more than like the gentle, indulgent, extin- 
guished mother. With every-day sight of such 
extinction under a dominating master's hand, 'tis 
not strange that her own masculine ^Dower should 
by and by strike stout blows for the breaking of 
the bonds which held women in durance. 

She came early under the thrall of Emerson's 
genius ; but there was no electrical concert of 
forces between them ; ^^ the room enlarges when 
she comes," he says; and the horizon widens under 
that billowy talk which fascinated so many ; but 

— at her going — a large home content and relief 
always came to him, with no yearnings for a con- 
tinuance of the spell. '^ Such a predetermina- 
tion," sa3^s Carlyle,* *^ to eat this big universe as 
her oyster ... I have not before seen in 
any human soul." 

In those days of her occasional coming to 

•Correspondence of Carlyle and Emerson, vol. ii., p. 212. 



MARGARET FULLER. 



179 



Brook Farm, she was editing, or had edited, The 
Biol — that recognized mirror of transcendental 
thought, of which the prospectus had been writ- 
ten by George Kipley. Therefore due reverence 
sat upon the young auditors of West Koxbury, 
when this Sybil — of the curled locks, high fore- 




-"-traaji^nr, 



Margaret Fuller Cottage. 



head, half-closed eyes, over-laced corsage and 
beautiful arms — ^with prehensile grip of taper fin- 
gers — launched away into her smooth-flowing, 
rapturous but immethodical talks. From The 
Dial — given over to the editing of Emerson — 
she went to the Kew York Tribune, where Greeley 
was conquered by her graces, and her wide-ranging 



i8o AMERICAN LANDS &- LETTERS. 

humanities. For one or two years she conducted 
the critical department of that journal with spirit 
and cleverness : but not always with equanimity, 
or clear foresiglit. She never ceased to belabor 
Longfellow, in hystericky fashion, for his alle- 
giance to British traditions and for setting the 
nightingale to singing where the Bob-o^-Lincoln 
should have trilled his roundelay ; she foretold 
disaster and wreck for the literary reputation of 
the author of Parson WiWiir (and Mr. Lowell 
repaid her in kind). 

On her voyage to Europe (1846) she was 
equipped with exuberant letters from Emerson, to 
Carlyle, Landor, and others ; nor was she ever 
abashed, nor did she ever count herself " second," 
in any interview with the cleverest. 

Established for awhile in Italy, she encounters 
there Mrs. Browning, who (in one of her recently 
published letters) speaks of her as a very agreeable 
and noticeable person — more enjoyable than her 
books. It was at Rome, too — in the winter of 
1846-47 that the love experience befell Miss 
Fuller, which transmuted the cavilling, eloquent, 
self-contained conversationalist into the impas- 



THE OSSOLI MARRIAGE. 



i«i 



sioned, warm-hearted, self-denying wife of the 
Marquis Ossoli. This young Roman — many 
years her junior, and attached in some way to the 
papal service — was an easy-going, presentable, 
amiable man, not up 
to the level of Miss 
Fuller's ranges of 
philosophic talk. 
'* Wonderful," wrote 







Bruok Farm, trum the Margaret Fuller Cuttai^e. 



Mrs. Browning, ^^ how such marriages come 
about ! '' 

But it did come about, and had swift and fate- 
ful issues — a romance from start to close. This 
rarely instructed, observant, masculine -minded 



1 82 AMERICAN LANDS ^ LETTERS. 

woman — with the half-closed, languorous eyes — 
had, on some day of fete, lost herself in the aisles 
of St. Peter's, or in the corridors of the Vatican. 
In her bewilderment she had been offered guid- 
ance and attendance home by a gracious young 
official ; visitations followed, and a beguiling ac- 
quaintance, with all the blandishments that be- 
long to the communings of Eoman doves upon 
the lip of a classic vase. 

Then follows a secret marriage (1847) — family 
and political reasons forcing this policy upon the 
young marquis — who has little revenue and the 
new marchioness still less ; but there is bravery in 
her, and the old spirit of resolve ; a humble har- 
bor for mother and child (September, 1848) is 
found in the little mountain town of Rieti — 
while the marquis feels his way doubtfully, amid 
the distractions that belong to Eoman affairs, 
while the shadow of a French army of occupa- 
tion is darkening the air ; but Marquisates were 
at a discount in those days of Eevolution and of 
Mazzinis. 

The rest of the story is short. The new mother 
— who had held coteries of bright young people 



THE OSS O LI MARRIAGE. 183 

enraptured with her brilliant talk — gathers up 
her little properties^, of relics, of *'*^heart''s-ease/^ of 
classic memories, and sets sail, with husband and 
child, for home. It was summer weather, but 
July has its storms ; and in one of them, the ship 
(or brig) upon which the marchioness was a pas- 
senger, was driven upon the sands oif Fire Island ; 
father and mother were lost ; the babe was picked 
up — dead, upon the shore. This was on July 17, 
1850. In 1852 was published the Blithedale Ro- 
mance (presumably written in 1851) on the latter 
pages of which appears that startling picture of 
^' the marble image of a death agony. . . . Her 
wet garments swathing limbs of terrible inflexibil- 
ity." I have often wondered if some newspaper 
reporter's cold - blooded details about the find- 
ings from the wreck — upon that July day — 
may not possibly have worked upon the imagina- 
tion of Hawthorne (who knew the marchioness 
at the ^' Farm " and other- wlieres) and so given 
some of its blotches of color to the corpse of the 
drowned Zenobia. 



1.84 AMERICAN LANDS &- LETTERS. 



Alcott of the Orphic Sayings. 

Among the heljoers toward giving a proper 
transcendental tone to that quarterly. The Dial, of 
which I have spoken in connection with Margaret 
Fuller, was a man — almost of an earlier genera- 
tion — who sometimes showed his prophet face at 
Brook Farm, and whose clever daughter, Miss 
Louisa Alcott, has been one of the most welcome 
purveyors of story-delights for that generation of 
children which grew up during our war of secession. 
Of course, I allude to Bronson Alcott,* of whom 
Emerson said, in letters (perhaps meant to be 
private) — '^'^a most extraordinary man, and the 
highest genius of his time ; " and again — " more 
of the God-like than in any man I have seen.'^ f 

In these opinions, ^tis plain, Carlyle did not 
share ; he writes to Emerson (July, 1842) " Alcott 
came . . . bent on saving the world by a re- 
turn to acorns and the golden age ... a kind 

* Amos Bronson Alcott, b. 1799; d. 1888. Concord Days .^ 
1872. Orphic Sayings, 1841-42. 
f Cabot's Emerson., vol. i., p. 279. 




A. Bronson Alcott. 



BRONSON ALCOTT, 187 

of Venerable Don Quixote, whom nobody can even 
laugh at without loving/' 

This reforming Quixote, who shared the advanced 
views of most radicals of his day, was born in a 
small country town of Connecticut, on the edge of 
two centuries (1799). From his father he in- 
herited mechanical aptitudes and little else. His 
schooling was limited and scrimpy ; and in extreme 
youth he was started with a little budget of books 
and trinkets upon a peddling expedition through 
Southern Virginia. Mrs. (Hawthorne) Lathrop in 
recent Reminiscences of her father, tells pleasantly 
how Mr. Alcott, in his later years, used to go over, 
with gusto, stories of his early Virginian travels. 
He ingratiated himself with hospitable planters 
and traders — beginning then and there his rhap- 
sodies of edifying talk ; but making few sales and 
bad ones (as he continued to do all his life). In- 
deed his aptness for empty pockets was quite ex- 
ceptional. 

He had, however, a quick sense of what was 
lacking in school methods, and sought earnestly to 
mend them — believing in the tongue as a great 
educational agent, and carrying young folks into 



1 88 AMERICAN LANDS &- LE'ITERS. 

the arcana of knowledge on the buoyancy of his 
engaging and redundant talks. Miss Fuller had 
been sometime a reverent pupil of his ; and I 
daresay caught from his flowing, discursive meth- 
ods;, a stimulant to the more brilliant ore-ro- 
tiuido discursions of her own. 

The Orpliic Sayings, which he contributed to 
The Dial (under Miss Fuller's administration) are 
perhaps most characteristic of him ; he was rather 
mystical than profound; he delighted in forays 
into regions of the unknown — with whatever ten- 
tative or timid steps — and although he may have 
13ut a vehemence into his expression that would 
seem to imply that he was drifting in deep waters 
— one cannot forbear the conviction that 't would 
be easy for this man of the explorative mentalities 
to touch ground with his feet (if he chose) — in 
all the bays where he swims. 

Conco7^d Again. 

Emerson would naturally have given cordial 
welcome to Alcott when he came to plant himself 
permanently at the " Hillside '' in Concord. The 



EMERSON AGAIN. 191 

sobrieties and the large dignities in which the 
Orphic philosopher wrapped even his shallowest 
speech and his action, could not be otherwise than 
agreeable to the man who had a horror of noise 
and bounce. ^^ The person who screams '^ — Emer- 
son tells us in his talk on Manners — "or who 
uses the superlative degree, or converses with heat, 
puts whole drawing-rooms to flight/' 

For a little time there was a concerted scheme 
that Alcott should become and remain an inmate 
of the Emerson house : but after some trial this 
home concert joggled away from good bearings : 
sovereignty does not easily lend itself to twinship. 
Another sort of home copartnery subsisted for 
awhile with that youthful, keen-sighted Thoreau 
(of whom we shall have by and by more to say) who 
volunteered instruction of the philosopher in 
gardening arts — to the practical side of which 
arts the editor of The Dial did not take very 
aptly ; indeed some pleasant observer tells us how 
the young son of the house was wont to cry out 
warningly — " Don't dig your legs. Father ! " 

But for Emerson there was always large and 
fruitful companionship with the pines that 



192 AMERICAN LANDS &- LETTERS. 

fringed Concord hills and that sighed over the 
shingles of his own roof-tree — with the ^^ fresh 
Rhodora '' whose ^' purple petals " he has made a 
^^ rival of the rose^^ — with all the towns-people, 
too, taught and untaught, for whom he has way- 
side chat and pleasant benignities of question and 
of consolation — finding his way by quaint, fa- 
miliar, homely phrases to their hearts' desires and 
small ambitions — not feeding his wisdom by 
any aloofness, but mixing with the towns-folk, 
and measuring minds with them, and so grow- 
ing into the calm meditative philosophy of his 
'' Musket-aquid,'' 

" And, chief est prize, found I true liberty 
In the glad home plain-dealing nature gave. 
The polite found me impolite ; the great 
Could mortify me, but in vain ; for still 
I am a willow of the wilderness, 
Loving the wind that bent me. All my hurts 
My garden spade can heal. A woodland walk, 
A quest of river-grapes, a mocking thrush, 
A wild rose, or rock loving columbine, 
Salve my worst wounds." 

And this holy unction of the quiet New Eng- 
land village life, Emerson the teacher and the lay- 



EMERSON AS VILLAGER, 193 

preachei* carries with him wherever he goes ; — to 
crowded halls in cities — to the poetry-pages of Tlie 
Dial — to great festive celebrations — to Parker's 
supper-house in Boston and to the *' town-meet- 
ings '' of Concord. Kor can I believe (with a re- 
cent clever essayist)* that he carries only intel- 
lectual chill witli him, or distrust of the '' emo- 
tions." It appears to me that he fore-answered, in 
his own mystic, deep-reaching ways, such charges 
(old as well as new) in his chapter on ''Love'' ; 
and that there was a fulness of eager heart-beat be- 
hind the pen which wrote of his boy (for whom 
the "Threnody" was made) that he was ''a piece 
of love and sunshine " ; I remember too that he 
opened his screed on '' Friendship " (far warmer 
than Bacon's) with the dictum — "we have a 
great deal more kindness than is ever spoken." 

I have talked of Tlie Dial — which carries as re- 
cord of the passing times, some of his best poems 
— " Wood Notes" among them; and I have 
spoken of Brook Farm and its Idyllic print of new 
foot-marks on the Roxbury hillside — both these 

* John Jay Chapman in Emerson and other Essays^ p. 
83. Scribner, 1898. 



194 AMERICAN LANDS &^ LETTERS. 

ventures of new thinkers and planners seeming to 
have gained much of their purpose and trend 
from the teachings of Emerson, who was anchored 
in the repose of Concord ; noisy antagonism, and 
obstreperous advocacy of even a good cause were 
never in his way. " If I work honestly and steadily 
in my own garden I am making protest against 
slave-labor.'^ The impatient temperance zealots 
cannot bring him to the breakage of all the home 
demijohns.* Even Garrison cannot win him to 
fiery outbursts in The E^nancipator ; ^tis only 
much later — when the Fugitive Slave Law brings 
its trail of open cruelties and of moral shivers — 
that Emerson's humane spirit breaks out into 
vehement, scorching protest. 

Yet that quiet lapse of life beside the slowly 
flowing rivers of Concord is not wholly unbroken. 
Sorrows cast shadows over those peaceful mead- 
ows ; there is a second visit to England (1847) 

* But let not this be understood as questioning in the 
slightest degree his own faith, and practise of temperate 
ways of life : but only as Emerson's protest against the val- 
idity of bolts and bars and pledges, as compared with the 
guiding dictates of an awakened, individual conscience. 



ENGLISH TRAITS. 195 

out of which, and the lectures there, came the 
book we know as Bepresentative Men, and the later 
one of English Traits. The biting and searching 
qualities of this latter, all people who read good 
books know of. There is honest praise in it, and 
free speech. He misdoubts mitres indeed — as he 
smiles over his glass at my Lord Bishop^s table ; 
but he hears under all the fustian (and it makes 
him proud) the doughty step of the English Yeo- 
man and the whizzing of the cloth -yard shaft, 
which only that yeoman's strong arm could send 
home. To be critical of the follies and the fallings- 
short of the mother-country, and yet to admire 
and take pride in her stalwart virtues — this could 
be done, and toas done by this quiet, meditative 
man — measuring his paces by the lapse of the 
slow-going Concord rivers — in a way that kindled 
an enthusiasm of full belief. 

He was always a student, yet most recondite in 
his own processes of thought ; not massing ma- 
terial — for the sake of mass ; keenly alive to 
the brilliance that threw light, on points at issue ; 
other brilliancies counted only as feux d'artifice. 
Always a good ^^ hop and skip " reader — catching 



196 AMERICAN LANDS &- LETTERS. 

bright flashes of other men's utterance — for dec- 
orative or suggestive usage ; but never vitalizing 
his own speech with another's thoughts ; rather 
cherishing, or even memorizing them as stimuhants 
to new ranges of his own. Studying words sharply, 
to the end of using only a few, and putting terse- 
ness before all flowers of rhetoric. AVhat was not 
marrowy never caught his praise ; loving indeed 
so much this essential vitality, that he could ex- 
cuse or overlook the grossness which (in some 
speech) went with it. 

Emerson wrote little after the close of the War 
(1865) : he aged early, compared with a good many 
veterans ; memory refused him its old favors ; his 
eyes tired him and perplexed him with double fig- 
ures. A new over-ocean tri}) brought quick move- 
ment to his blood — but not for long. Egypt, 
with its great range of dynasties, tired him ; and 
so did the Sphinx — out-staring the riddles of 
^'Bramah.'' 

Yet a brave Optimism keeps by him when the 
shadows are darkest. ^^ If it be best that conscious 
personal life shall continue, it will continue ; if 
not best then it will not ; and we, if we saw the 




Emerson's Grave. 



DEATH OF EMERSON. 199 

whole, should of course see that it was better so/' 
He died on the 27th of April, 1882. A fragment 
of granite marks his grave — a fitting symbol of 
his nobility of character. 



CHAPTER IV. 

WE could have lingered longer over the last 
3'ears of Emerson ; they were so full of 
serenities, and of the memories of a life conse- 
crated to high ways of thinking and to all honest 
ways. That square old house of his, with the 
pines sighing over it, is sofnehow much richer in 
suggestiveness — even of country delights — than 
the tangle of rustic decoration which once hooded 
the arbor of the Orphic philosopher — from whose 
home at the ^^ Hill-side^'' will always come pleas- 
antest reminiscences of the daughter who charmed 
all boyhood and girlhood with her stories of Little 
Women. 

The Brook-Farm Idyl — springing largely from 
the love and conscience of the Riple3's — drifts 
again before us with its glowing even-tides of mer- 
riment, when fine young spirits loitered there and 

spun their fables of hope. 

200 



PARKER AND FULLER. 201 

Brownson, though not of right in our story, 
showed his tergiversations ; — not those of a clown 
or mountebank, but of a high, close thinker, 
made unsteady by the toppling weight he carried. 
Parker thundered and glittered from his theatre 
pulpit, bringing street-folk to earnest thought 
about subjects which had been long masked in 
ecclesiastic formulas of speech. 

One had glimpse of that rare-talking, fine- 
armed, delicate-fingered Marchioness Ossoli, who 
left little behind her to live ; — not even the 
pretty Italian babe which sprung from the sole, 
dominating romance of her ambitious life. AYe 
followed her Dial record ; we slipped into the 
wordy trail of the maker of Orphic Sayings' — all 
which brought us again to the home and the 
habits of that other serene philosopher, who wore 
his dignities untarnished by vices or by arro- 
gance, and who slipped from life as easily and 
calmly as his own Concord Kiver slips from under 
bordering vines and brakes to deeper and waiting 
waters beyond. 



202 AMERICAN LANDS &- LETTERS. 

Haivthorne. 

Another Concord name — though not such by 
birth-right — is that of the Great Romancer,* of 




Hawthorne's Birthplace, Salem, 
whom we have had glimpse at Brook Farm, and 

* Nathaniel Hawthorne (originally Hathorn), b. 1804 ; d. 
1864 Twice-told Tales^ 1837; Second Series, 1845; 3Iosses 
from an Old Manse^ 1846; The Scarlet Letter^ 1850; Blithe- 
dale Romance^ 1852 ; The 3Iarhle Faun, I860. Life (in Eng- 
lish Men of Letters), by Henry James, Jr.; Nathaniel 
Hawthorne and his Wife, by Julian Hawthorne ; also much 
biographic material in memorial volume by George P La- 



Captain Nathaniel Hathorne. 

From, a miniature in the possession of y iilian Hawthorne, Esq. 



HA WTHORNE. 205 

whose home life had its happy dawn under the 
roof of the ^' Old Manse," and its ripened glow at 
the " Way-side." 

Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in Salem, in a 
small, unpretending, gambrel-roofed house — still 
showing its storm - beaten sides — in a narrow 
street, almost within reach of the scuds of spray 
which a strong east wind drives shore-ward from 
Salem harbor. His father was a sea-captain, lov- 
ing the salty odors of little Union Street ; yet, if 
we may trust existing portraits, there were lines 
of great beauty and refinement in his face ; and 
a firmness and dignity too, born of an ancestry 
which the names of judges and counsellors 
adorned. But this sea-going father-Hathorne 
died in a foreign port, when his only son — our 
romancer — was scarce four years of age. 

Then came dolorous times for the little family 

throp, and (more recently) another by Mrs. Rose Haw- 
thorne Lathrop. 

The James Biography is interesting — pointed and polished 
— as his work always is : but rather over-weighted with a re- 
dundance of British condescension — to which " manner " the 
clever biographer has affiliated himself with a distinguished 
aptitude and complacency. 



2o6 AMERICAN LANDS &> LETTERS. 

under the Union Street roof ; the widowed mother 
carrying the dolor through years of rigid seclu- 
sion ; her brother, however — of that Manning * 
name so long and honorably associated with the 
horticultural development of our Eastern States 
— came nobly to the rescue ; the fatherless lad 
grew into a sturdy boyhood upon his uncle's lands 
and woods near to Sebago Lake, in Maine. 
'^''Twas there/' he says — under a whifP of that 
impatient self-crimination which sometimes blew 
over him in his later years — " that I caught my 
cursed habit of solitude/' But he was not wholly 
right ; there was an heirship from close-lipped 
Puritan ancestors, that — as much as the wilds of 
Maine — put him into those solitary moods, from 
which flashed the splendors of his literary con- 
quests. Nor can there be a doubt that he caught 
in those boyish days in the forests that throw 
their shadow on Sebago, a knowledge and an ex- 
perience of woody solitude, which afterward gave 

♦Robert Manning, b. 1784; d. 1842, was a widely known 
Poraologist ; contributed largely to the costs of Hawthorne's 
education, and was one of the founders of the Massachu- 
setts Horticultural Society. 



HA WTHORNE. 



207 



sombre coloring to some of the wonderful forest 
pictures belonging to Tivice-told Tales, or the 
Scarlet Letter. 

A dozen or more of the most impressible of his 
younger years he passed there ; coming back odd- 




On the Shores of Sebago Lake. 



whiles, for special schooling (which he did not 
love) to Salem, and to the tall, gaunt house of his 
grandfather Manning, still lifting that cumbrous 
roof to the weather — under Avhich, at a later day, 
our necromancer put little Pearl and Hester 
Prynne into their glorified shapes. 

There are stories of an illness and of a lameness 



2o8 AMERICAN LANDS &^ LETTERS. 

in the new Salem home ; and of a beguilement of 
enforced imprisonment by the penning of a boy- 
ish journal — The Spectator. I had the privilege 
man}'^ years since of looking over some numbers 
of the journal — then in the keeping of one of 
the Manning family — carefully penned in print- 
lettering, and setting forth among other things, 
that " Xathaniel Hathorne [so spelled by him at 
that date] proposes to publish by subscription a 
new edition of the 'Miseries of Authors/ to which 
will be added a sequel containing facts and re- 
marks drawn from his own experience/'' And 
again — sounding somewhat strangely from such 
a source, came this pronunciamento — 

"On Solitude: Man is naturally a sociable being; not 
formed for himself alone ; but destined to bear a part in the 
great scheme of nature. All his pleasures are heightened, 
and all his griefs are lessened by participation. It is only in 
society that the full energy of his mind is aroused and all its 
poAs^ers drawn forth. Apart from the world there are no in- 
citements to the pursuit of excellence ; there are no rivals 
to contend with, and therefore there is no improvement." 

An elder sister, Elisabeth, in a letter referring 
to those days, speaks of his '^teasing" habit, as a 




o 
U 



o 

O 



=: ^ 



^ 



BOWDOIN COLLEGE. 211 

boy, and of his '^seizing a kitten and tossing it 
over a fence/' * This seems to strike a false note 
in the symphonies of those child years ; nor do 
I find other things in that tone until I recall the 
gleesome way in which old Chillingworth makes 
the fiery brand of his persecution eat into the 
very flesh of poor Dimmesdale. 

But the boyish teasings, and all boyish baitings 
go by ; with good school equipment he finds liis 
way to Bowdoin College — with Huguenot flavors 
in its name — and flanked by pine woods which 
keep alive recollections of Sebago Lake. 

College Mates and Associations, 

Bowdoin College was counted an excellent one in 
those days, and a good Northeastern guardian of 
the orthodoxy, which was threatened at Harvard. 
Dr. William Allen,f maker of the first good Amer- 
ican Biographic Dictionary, and a kindly, pious, 



* J. Hawthorne's Biography^ page 99, vol. i. 

t Dr. William Allen, b. 1784 ; d. 1868 First edition of 
Biographical Dictionary^ published in 1809, while he was 
Assistant Librarian at Harvard ; 2d edition, 1832 ; 3d edition 
(greatly enlarged), 1857. 



212 AMERICAN LANDS ^ LETTERS. 



unctuous, but not over-strong man, had gone there 
as president (1820) only the year before the entry 
of Hawthorne. Jacob Abbott* had graduated 

thence in 18 2 
— the man who 
afterward opened 
a *' Way to do 
Good '"* for many 
a zealous " Young 
Christian/' and 
who brightened 
hundreds of New 
England firesides 
with his beguiling 
child stories about 
'^Rollo^' and 
'*^ Jonas." An- 
other Abbott brother f — a class-mate of Haw- 
thorne's, was afterward well known for his piquant 
little histories of ^' Kings and Queens,'' and for 




Jacob Abbott. 



* Jacob Abbott, b. 1803; d. 1870. His books counted by 
tbe hundred ; and he left sons who have won distinction in 
connection with the bar, the pulpit, and journalism. 

t John S. C. Abbott, b. 1805 ; d. 1877. 



HORATIO BRIDGE. 213 

his very roseate-colored, but entertaining story of 
Napoleon. 

A ruddy-cheeked young fellow from Portland 
— Henry Longfellow by name — was another 
classmate of our romancer whom we shall again 
encounter; nor must we forget that bundle of 
temperance, anti-slavery, and orthodox enthusi- 
asms, known as the Kev. George B. Cheever,* 
who wrote pungently of ^^ Deacon Giles's Distil- 
lery," of a " Pilgrim's Wanderings," under Mont 
Blanc, and for many a year lifted up his strident 
voice in that church of the truncated steeple, 
which once stood on Union Square, where now 
Tiffany & Co. dispense jewels of a different 
order. 

Yet another member of Hawthorne's class was 
Horatio Bridge \ — later. Commodore Bridge of 
the United States Navy — whom our romancer 
dearly loved and trusted — who put the cheer of 

♦George B. Cheever, b. 1807; d. 1890 

f Horatio Bridge, b. 1805 ; graduate of Bowdoin, 1825. 
Was Chief of Naval Bureau of Provisions and Clothing 
throughout the Civil War ; wrote the Journal of an African 
Cruiser^ 1845 (edited by Hawthorne), 



214 AMERICAN LANDS <2r* LETTERS. 



his earnest encouragement into the writer's most 
dismal days of waiting, and who never lost faith 
in either the genius or the coming fortunes of 
his friend. Franklin Pierce, General and Presi- 
dent, was of the class of 1824 at Bowdoin — hale- 
fellow with 
both Bridge 
and Haw- 
thorne — a 
1 i f e - 1 n g 
friend ship 
holding the 
three togeth- 
er ; and so it 
happened 
that when 
Hawthorne 
came to the 
writing of his 
F r e w r d s 
for the ''Old 




Horatio Bridge. 



From "Personal Recollections of Nathaniel Haw- 
thortie,' Harper &• Brothers, iSgj, 



Home '' sketches, he did not allow the qualms of 
publishers, or the doubtful savors which at that 
date, in New England, beclouded the political 



CONCORD MANSE. 215 

reputation of President Pierce, to forbid a bold 
tribute to an old college comrade, who — whatever 
may have been his shortcomings in statecraft — 
had shown a lion's courage in battle, and had car- 
ried into social life a kindliness and bonhomie that 
were most winning and beguiling. Hawthorne's 
friendships were both plucky and tenacious. 

I have named these contemporaries of those 
Bowdoin days, even as one might name the 
shapes and tints of a window through which a 
great light is drifting ; wondering in what degree 
that dominating light may have been modified 
(if at all) by the colorings and shapes through 
which it made way. 

From College to Manse. 

Seventeen long, waiting, anxious years lay be- 
tween the college graduation of our Romancer 
and his instalment in that Concord Manse where 
the ^'Mosses" grew. He did not take high 
honors ; he had scored his own path ; he knew 
where good fish lurked in the feeders of the 
Androscoggin ; he knew somewhat of the cellar- 
age of the Maine taverners ; President Allen may 



2i6 AMERICAN LANDS ^ LETTERS. 

have looked askance at him ; but the fires of 
ambition were smoking in him , he had tried his 



FANSHAWE. 



A TALE. 



" Wilt thou go on with mel" — Soi;THEr. 



••M^r)^**^ 



BOSTON : 

MARSH & CAPEN, 362 WASHINGTON STREET. 



PRESS or PUTKAM AND HOKT. 

1828. 



Facsimile of the Title Page of Hawthorne's First Book- 



hand at tale- writing ; and only a year or two later 
he put to print at his own cost his first novel of 



EARLY STORIES. 217 

Fanshaive. This proved a failure, of which he 
would have destroyed all trace and memory. The 
old Manning house in Salem was his home ; 
there, year after year, he wrought on new tales 
and brooded ; thence, he sauntered at night-fall 
through the salty streets. Sometimes Peter Parley 
bargained with him for a story, or a half-dozen ; 
other times, and later, the New York Knicker- 
bocker (at the hands of the amiable Gaylord Clark), 
or 'Sullivan of the De^nocratic Review sought 
favors — all scantily and slowly paid for. 

It would seem as if — in the early thirties — the 
buoyancies of youth had fallen away from him ; 
his poor mother cleaving to loneliness as solace 
for a grieving widowhood ; his two sisters catch- 
ing the ^' trick of grief' ; and he — as some notes 
seem to imply — considering if 'twere not best to 
conquer all the ills of life, by ending it ! Here is 
a characteristic bit of one of his friend Bridge's 
sailor-like, sweary letters, dated 1836 : 

" I've been trying to think what you are so miserable for. 
. . . Suppose you get but $300 per annum for your 
writings You can with economy live upon that, though it 
would be a d — d tight squeeze." 



2i8 AMERICAN LANDS &^ LETTERS. 

In the next year the same bouncing friend, on 
hearing a rumor that Hawthorne had thought of 
marriage, blows cold upon it. ^^I am in doubt/^ 
he says, '' if you would be more happy, . , . 
and am sure that unless you are fortunate in your 
choice you will be wretched in a ten-fold de- 
gree." * No such source of wretchedness ever 
came nigh him. It will hardly be believed that 
in those years when Bridge was extending to him 
his rough commiseration, the first series of the 
Ttuice-told Tales had been published (1837), and 
though meeting with highest critical approval, 
commanded little popular success and still less of 
moneyed return. 

Two years thereafter came a lifting of the 
clouds, when Hawthorne, at the instance of 
George Bancroft, became " weigher and ganger " 
at the Port of Boston, with an annual salary of 
certainly not more than 11,200. 'Twas " grimy 
work," as he said, but cheery ; and from two 
years in that service he put a helpless thousand 
dollars into the Brook Farm enterprise and a new 

* Julian Hawthorne's Biography^ page 138, vol. i 



BOSTON WHARVES. 



219 



zeal into his laggard courtship. We have delight- 
ful glimpses of him — fumbling over salt ships at 
Long Wharf — sleeping on piles of sails — steal- 
ing away to Salem — forecasting the fate of his 
Gentle Boy — sauntering along the Common or 




Frontispiece to the Rare Edition of 1839, of Hawthorne's 
*' Gentle Boy.'* 

Front a cojiy in the collection of Peter Gilsey; Esq. 

into the old Athenaeum gallery — putting an ever 
new warmth into letters written for Miss Sophia 
Peabody, with such happy interjections as this : 

" Invited to dine at Mr. Bancroft's yesterday, with Miss 



220 AMERICAN LANDS <S^ LETTERS. 

Margaret Fuller ; but Providence had given me some busi- 
ness to do, for which I was very thankful. 

" Is not this a beautiful morning ? (November, 1840,) 

" The sun shines into my soul." * 

Quick upon this came, with a change in the 
political tides (Harrison supplanting Van Buren), 
an upset of salt-measuring on Boston wharves, and 
of that unctuous experience in the barn-yards of 
Brook Farm, of which we have already had some 
flavors. There was only a year or so of this ; he — 
with a financial strabismus in his outlook — wonder- 
ing greatly how that thousand dollars, invested in 
a *^ stock company" should slip so utterly from 
him, down the pretty slopes where pine-trees 
grew and where the Apostle Eliot preached ! But 
notwithstanding this he courageously marries ; 
and those twain — mated of Heaven if ever any 
couple were — went to live (1842) in that old 
^' Manse" at Concord, about which Minister- 
memories of Ripleys and Emersons hung haunt- 
ingly, and where bridal doves cooed a welcome. 

The introduction to that book of Mosses from 
an Old Manse is itself a charming bit of autobi- 

* American Note Books^ vol. i., p. 221. 




o 

c 
o 
U 



13 
O 

s: 
H 



MANSE VISITORS. 223 

ography — so charming, so full, and so pictu- 
resque, that it warns me not to dwell descrip- 
tively upon that idyl in Hawthorne^s life. 

Emerson — half shyly, half magisterially — used 
to break in upon that quietude among the 
*^ mosses ^^ — delighted to talk by the half-hour to 
this man, whose listening was as aj)t as speech. 
Thoreau found his woodsy way thither, teaching 
him to paddle and selling him a boat. Alcott 
brought his long discourse there — except the 
new master slipped out by the river side — to un- 
ready and sometimes impatient ears. George Hil- 
lard, * of Boston, too, always an esteemed and 
welcome friend, finds his way to this new home 
— so do others not so congenial. 

Even at pre-arranged social gatherings there 
was a certain aloofness on his part ; not joining 
heartily in general talk ; yet watchful at noting 

* George S. Hillard, b. 1808; d. 1879; Harvard College, 
1828. He taught for a time at Round Hill School, and was 
associated with George Ripley in editing the Christian Reg- 
ister. Better known as editor of Boston Cou7'ier ; he was 
a clever writer, of high, aesthetic instincts, true, and unswerv 
ingly honest. Six Months in Italy, pub. 1853; Life of 
George Ticknor, 1873. 



224 AMERICAN LANDS &^ LETTERS. 

all its turns — unless its vapidity lured him into 
looking yearningly out o' window ; yet now and 
then putting in a query or comment which showed 
quick cognizance of some of the back-sets, and 
foregone utterances ; or, if not comment, then 
other provocative of change — a snag tossed into 
the current which made a parting and a rustling 
in the tide of talk. Forever, too, he was retreat- 
ing kindly and gratefully to his solitude and his 
silent musings, as he floated at even-fall up and 
down the silent river. Again, and again, I call to 
mind that letter of his dating from these years : 

'* I do Avish these blockheads, and all other blockheads 
m this world, could comprehend how inestimable are the 
quiet hours of a busy man — especially wlien that man has 
no native impulse to keep him busy — but is continually 
forced to battle with his own nature, which yearns for 
seclusion (the solitude of a mated two) and freedom to 
think and dream and feel." * 

There were undoubted advantages in that lone- 
liness toward which he gravitated ; his thoughts 
did not get dilution by mingling with thoughts of 
others, but took on density and normal crystalliza- 

♦ Julian Hawthorne's Biography^ vol i , p. 221. 



HIS SOLITUDE. 225 

tion. Of course, if at start such mind were fee- 
ble and had no emergent aptitudes, solitariness 
could be no way helpful ; but if, as here, it tend- 
ed to explorative forays — if it had instinctive and 
penetrative out-reach, grappling always after new 
truths or new collocations of old truths — then, 
solitude, and a mental attitude undisturbed by 
other voices or meddlesome interjection of 
others^ thoughts, insure, not only the repose 
which permits concentration, but a clarity of 
mind that makes it pervious to the finest and 
delicatest shades of truth. 

But the solitude of the Manse — as the master 
himself has hinted — was a solitude a deux : and 
before the sojourn among the mosses had ended 
'twas even more than this — for a little stranger 
had come, to knit closer the home bonds and to coo 
with the doves ; and Hawthorne's indebtedness 
to the mistress of his domesticity was always im- 
mense — her solicitude, her fondness, her wakeful 
guard over his privacies and solitariness (if de- 
manded), her keen sympathy, her acute and in- 
telligent appreciation of his subtlest word, her 

never-failing and always discerning praises of his 
15 



226 AMERICAN LANDS &- LETTERS. 

strongest picturings of human loves and embroil- 
ments, were beyond measure. And if there were 
some harsh notes, due to sharp and needful 
economies, blending with the harmonies of that 
earl}^ home, what an aureole of golden liglit all 
those little economies take on under the pleasant 
narrative of the devoted wife ! * 



The SurveyorsMp and Life at Lenox. 

No such aureole belongs to the chinking gold 
coin which soon after has a little intermittent out- 
pour from the till of the Salem Custom-house 
upon his domestic paths ; the place of Surveyor 
in that old town — whither he presently .wends 
his way (1846), came to him during the adminis- 
tration of President Polk ; f and again he finds 
shelter under ancestral roofs where was to ripen 
that wonderful story of the Scarlet Letter. 

It is delightful to see the exuberant spirit in 
which Mrs. Hawthorne makes note of the change 



* Memories of Hawthorne., edited by Mrs Rose Lathrop. 
t James K. Polk, b. 1795; d. 1849; President, 1845-49. 



SALEM CUSTOM-HOUSE. 



227 




The Custom-House, Salem. 

in their financial horizon ; she writes under date 
of March, 1846 : 



*'My husband is nominated by the President himself. 

. It is now certain, and so 1 tell it to you. 

The salary is twelve hundred dollars. . . . Will you 

ask father to go to Earle's and order for Mr. Hawthorne a 

suit of clothes; the coat to be of broadcloth, of six or seven 



228 AMERICAN LANDS &> LETTERS. 

dollars a yard ; the pantaloons of kerseymere or broadcloth 
of quality to correspond ; and the vest of satin — all to be 
black?" 

But government place and pay do not promote 
quickened work from the Romancer ; how rarely 
they do ! A few half-finished sketches, get full 



^ iV 1 -- iC.y 




XJi AW TH 1 1 U A' !•: 

Siiir/' 

Reduced Facsimile of Hawthorne's Stamp as Surveyor. 

equipment ; all the while, too, his eyes and ears 
are intent ; and those ancient retainers of the 
Government who loll in their chairs — tipped 
back against the walls in the Custom-house Hall 
— and tell of fat, gone-by dinners, and unctuous 
oyster sauces, get their pictures printed in a fash- 
ion that glows yet — and will glow for many a 



LIFE AT SALEM. 229 

year to come — upon the opening pages of the 
Scarlet Letter, 

Perhaps, also, the finishing touches may have 
been put to the Snow Linage in those Custom- 
house days at Salem ; certainly, too, there were 
vacation jaunts, and others — to Boston; that 
good friend George Hillard bidding him always 
welcome; urging the necessity of his going to 
dine with Longfellow ; but, says Hawthorne, in 
his journal — ^' I have an almost miraculous pow- 
er of escaping from necessities of this kind." 
Guarding thus his old solitariness ; watching the 
children at their little diversions which take color 
from the gray surroundings [" Now," says Una, 
**you must keep still, and play that you're dy- 
ing!"] ; while in the chamber above, the elder 
Mrs. Hawthorne, long estranged fi'om the world 
by her widowed grief, is dying in earnest. This 
happens in 1849 ; and in the same year, with the 
brooding unrest that comes with a political 
change — General Taylor supplanting Polk — 
there is fear that the Surveyorship may pass into 
other hands. 

Friends are active indeed ; but friends of 



230 AMERICAN LANDS &- LETTERS. 

other claimants of place^ are also active — no- 
tably a zealous clergyman of the town, who gets 
his moral portrait outlined in the family letters, 
with a raw and red coloring that has great stay- 
ing quality. "What wonder if — with illness in 
the head of the house, his mother dying, his 
means small, and his 23lace at the j)^^blic crib 
closed to him — there should creep into his oc- 
casional writing of that date a lurid tint ? What 
wonder if the old '' Inspector,^'' reckoned un- 
friendly, should take from his pen a black eye to 
carry into that gallery of portraits which illustrate 
his great Salem romance ? [I wish that, instead 
of such personal ink-marks, the fiery spirit of the 
author had been wrought upon to scourge, as it de- 
serves, that scramble for political spoil which still 
gives a heathenish cast to public service in America.] 
I speak of the Scarlet Letter as the Salem ro- 
mance, because 'twas virtually finished there ; and 
it was there he was won over to deliver the manu- 
script to that shrewd, kindly, quick-witted poet- 
publisher * who befriended the author throughout 

* James T. Fields, b. 1817; d. 1881. Poems, Boston, 
1849 ; Yesterdays with Authors^ 1872. 



RELATIONS WITH PUBLISHER, 



231 



his life — as liappy a copartnery, almost, as that 
of his marriage. Fields was not only sympathetic 
through and through, with all the lines of Haw- 
thorne^'s work, but he 
was actively encourag- 
ing and stimulative ; he 
knew how to make his 
sympathy bear fruit — 
not only giving those 
warm tid-bits of praise 
(which authors have a 
ripe taste for) but he 
brought coyly, as it 
were, and accidentally 

to his knowledge other waifs of admiring comment, 
sterling in quality, from far-away quarters. Thus 
he stirred in the author self-gratulatory currents 
of blood, which ran into his pen-strokes, and 
vitalized his industries ; nor did the patron forget 
those little blessings of books which came from 
the corner of Milk Street, to cheer his Christ- 
mases ; and those other-time gifts of other sorts, 
which kept the animating friendship of the two 
in a wakeful condition. 




James T. Fields. 



232 AMERICAN LANDS &- LETTERS. 

Life in Berkshire. 

It was early in 1850 that Hawthorne took final 
leave of Salem — never agam, it is to be feared, 
warming toward its wharves and its quiet streets 
— and planted himself in a red cottage, upon a 
pretty slope of the Berkshire hills. The region 
was beautiful ; a little way southward was that 
Stockbridge realm, which we found all a-trill with 
Sedgwick solos * or duets ; and northward — by as 
easy a walk — was the lifted town of Lenox, where 
now gigantic villas and the flower-muffled wheels 
of Fashion have displaced the old charming and 
homely ruralities which once clothed the hills. 

To that red Hawthorne cottage — now wholly 
gone — used to come a-visiting in those days, G. P. 
R. James, that kindly master of Knights ^' in 
gay caj^arison,"" and Fanny Kemble Butler, quick 
to detect the Shakespearian savors which this 
American had caught from the great master ; 
J. T. Headley, \ was there — a good guide to the 

* 'Aynerican Lands a?id Letters^ vol. i, p. 350. 
f Joel T. Headley, b. 1813; d. 1897. Napoleon and his 
Marshals., 1846. 




3 
O 
33 

T3 



O 

'Co 



a 
> 

vi-i 

o 



o 
a. 



00 

QQ 



BERKSHIRE VISITORS. 



235 



mountain fastnesses of the region, who had jnst 
won a baptism into the fold of popular authors, 
by the inspiriting fife and drum of his '^ Napo- 
leon " and of his 
^' Washington/^ Her- 
man Melville * was a 
not-far-off neighbor, 
whose Typ ee and 
Omoo had delighted 
Hawthorne as well as a 
world of readers ; and 
who at this epoch of his 
life — distrained of ear- 
lier simplicities — was 
torturing himself with 
the metaphysic subtle- 
ties of Mohy Dick and whipping all the depths of 
his thought into turbulent and misty spray. 

The Hawthorne cottage was small, but the 
mistress, by her winsome housekeepery, made 
it charming ; by simple replicas of tracery or 
drawing, Michael Angel o's Sybils and Prophets 

* Herman Melville, b. 1819; d. 1891. Ty^te, 1846; Mohy 
Dick J or the White Whale^ 1851. 




Herman Melville. 

From a fhotografh in the collection of 
Robert Coster, Esq. 



236 AMERICAN LANDS &- LETTERS. 

preached from the walls : and so did Raphael with 
some Madonna or *' Transfiguration," and Cor- 
reggio with his cherub pieties ; while the elfin chil- 
dren of the family disported with the household 
pets, or wandered away with the master to the 
lake-side, where the five-year-old boy throws off 
his line, and the girl cries out to the mountain 
shore, for ^' God to say the echo." 

What was written under those conditions should 
be written well ; and so it was. Many of the 
*' Wonder " Stories grew, there; and so did that 
more marvellous New-England prose poem, about 
the stern Hepzibah and the blithe Phoebe, which 
we know as the Hoiise of the Seven Gables ; if not 
his best book (as the author thought it in his 
serener moods), it is certainly next best. If 
Dante had ever told a story of the crime and mys- 
teries which saturated some old country house 
upon the Euganean hills, I think it would have 
had much of the color, and much of the high, 
fierce lights which blaze about the gables of the 
Pynchons ! Yet it is all his own ; — change as his 
theme may, the author is redolent everywhere of 
his own clean and complete self-hood ; he is not 



LEAVE OF BERKSHIRE. 237 

like the rare Stevenson of our day, on whose close- 
thumbed pages we encounter — now, Defoe with 
his delicious particularity and naivete — now, find 
him egotizing, as does Montaigne, or lapsing into 
such placid humors as embalm the periods of 
Lamb ; or, yet again, catching in smart grip the 
trumpet of some old glorified Romancer, and 
summoning his knights (who are more than toy- 
knights) to file down once more from their old 
mediaeval heights upon the dusty plains of to-day. 
No such golden memorial-trail enwraps the books 
of the Master of Puritan Romance ; but, always 
the severe, unshaken, individual note was upper- 
most — bred of that New Englandism in which 
stern old judges of witchcraft battled with wrong- 
doers, and Pearl-like children wandered in forest 
solitudes, where silence brooded and paths spar- 
kled in the frosts. 

Religious Qualities in Haivthorne. 

Hawthorne's home affections were never rooted 
deeply in Berkshire ; unrest overtook him ; if he 
did not sigh for Salem, he did sigh for a closer 
neighborhood with seas and their salty airs. He 



238 AMERICAN LANDS &^ LETTERS. 

loved change, too ; and at AYest Newton (1851- 
52) he set himself with zeal to the working out 
of his romance of Blithedale. By a tramp 
through Newton Highland and over Oak Hill, 
he could reach the Brook - Farm region, and 
sharpen his memory of the woods and brooks ; 
and if the brilliant Zenobia had never her coun- 
terpart in the Marchioness Ossoli (who has just 
now, 1851, gone to death in a Fire-Island wreck), 
we may be sure that the personality of our au- 
thor does sometimes declare itself in the speech of 
Miles Coverdale. Isn't ' it the very Hawthorne, 
who has some time reminded his little daughter 
(when she has stolen her brother's seat) of Christ's 
teachings — that overhears Hollingsworth, in the 
chamber at Blithedale ? 

" The solemn murmur of his voice made its way to my 
ears, compelling me to be an auditor of his awful privacy 
■with the Creator. It affected me with a deep reverence for 
Hollingsworth, which no familiarity then existing, or that after- 
wards grew more intimate between us — no, nor any subsequent 
perception of his own great errors — ever quite effaced." * 

* Blithedale Romance^ p. 48 (1st edition). The incident 
respecting his daughter may be found iu a letter of Mrs. 
Hawthorne, date of June, 1850. 



HAWTHORNE'S RELIGION. i-y) 

I think there is something more in this than 
belongs to "^ the distant and imaginative rever- 
ence " which historian Green attributes to Shake- 
speare. Yet Hawthorne was never apt at cliiirch- 
going or close sermon-listening. When in a 
religious mood, he did not want his '^ builded 
forecasts " to be toppled over by another's con- 
ventional masonry or dead weight ; he used to 
urge strenuously — and I think wisely — that the 
Bible publishers should recast the sacred writings 
into various volumes of pocketable size, so that 
those who loved such, might keep to the Christ- 
story, or the lordly eloquence of Isaiah and other 
prophets, without the "^^drag" of statistic Chroni- 
cles and the tedious minuscules of Levitican law ; 
always doubting the good proportions of humanly 
built theologies, and the ponderous phraseologies 
of the doctors ; yet believing — if not devoutly, 
yet absolutely — in some Supreme Representative 
of Justice and Mercy and Righteousness, who is, 
and who Reigns. Else he could never have put 
poor Hepzibah into her eager effort to 

" Send up a prayer through the dense gray clouds 
[overhanging her] from which it fell back a 



240 AMERICAN LANDS &- LETTERS. 

lump of lead upon her heart. . . . But Hepzibah did 
not see that, just as there comes a warm sunbeam into 
every cottage window, so comes a love-beam of God's care 
and pity for every separate need." * 

Hawthorne had a noble scorn of falsity, which 
WSiS in itself a good sort of religion. 



Neiv Changes. 

There was large profit accruing from the two 
books — Seve7i Gables and the Blitliedale Romance 
— so that our author was at length (and for the 
first time) enabled to buy and equip a home of his 
own — now well known as ^' Wayside " in Concord. 
It was an unpretending home, under the lea of 
a pine-clad hill^ flanking the Lexington, road, 
and looking out southerly, over a stretch of 
alluvial meadow, which rolled into other pine- 
clad hills, two miles away, in whose lap lay 
the pretty Walden Pond. But hardly had he 
nestled into this new home when other and 
broader changes came, putting a livelier color 
upon his prospects. 

* House of the Seven Gables., vol. ii., p. 126. 



LIVERPOOL CONSULATE. 243 

In the autumn of 1852 his old college mate 
Franklin Pierce was elected President ; and early 
in the following spring Hawthorne was named 
Consul for Liverpool. The office was not at 
that time a salaried one, but was worth to the 
incumbent, through fees, twenty to thirty thou- 
sand dollars per annum.* This gave a more 
faery-like hue to the immediate future than had 
belonged to many recent years of the ^^ Survey- 
or's" family; and we may be sure that it was 
with buoyant hearts that they set off for the Old 
Home which was to have a new picturing on the 
pages of Hawthorne's English book, and on the 
pages of his life. 

Haivtliorne^s Personality 

It was just at this juncture, when the fame 
of the Scarlet Letter and of the Seven Gables was 

* Henry James, Jr., Biography (p. 141) errs in say- 
ing " salary attached was reduced by Congress," etc. No 
salary was attached until after the date of Hawthorne's ap- 
pointment. Some time in 1853 or '54 it was fixed at $7,500. 
Three months of clerical service in the consular office of 
Liverpool in 1844, gave to the present writer some knowl- 
edge of its inner workings. 
16 



244 AMERICAN LANDS &- LETTERS, 



fresh, and when the plaudits of tens of thousands 
of admirers were mingling with the gratulations 
of those friends who bade him God speed ! in his 
voyage across seas, that I had the honor of 
meeting with the distinguished author for the 
first time ; and gracious pardon will I am sure bo 

shown me, if I try to 
recall, with some partic- 
ularity, the details and 
memories of that early 
interview. 

The time was April of 
1853 ; a journey south- 
ward had brought me 
to Willard's Hotel in 
Washington. Haw- 
thorne was a fellow- 




W. D. Ticknor. 



lodger, in company with his cheery publisher 
William D. Ticknor, whom I had previously 
known, and through whose off-hand, kindly offices, 
opportunity was given of paying personal homage 
to the author. 

Mr. Hawthorne was then nearing fifty — 
strong, erect, broad-shouldered, alert — his abun* 




Hawthorne at the Age of Forty-eight. 

From a portrait paintedin 1852 by C- G. Thompson and now in the possession 0/ Mrs- 
Rose Hawthortie Lathrop. 



HAWTHORNE'S PERSONALITY. 247 

dant hair touched with gray, his features all 
cast in Greek mould and his fine eyes full of 
searchingness^ and yet of kindliness ; his voice 
deep, with a weighty resounding quality, as if 
bearing echoes of things unspoken ; no arrogance, 
no assurance even, but rather there hung about 
his manner and his speech a cloud of self-distrust, 
of mal-aise, as if he were on the defensive in re- 
spect of his own quietudes, and determined to rest 
there. AYithal, it was a winning shyness ; and 
when — somewhat later — his jolly friend Ticknor 
tapped him on the shoulder, and told him how 
some lad wanted to be presented, there was some- 
thing almost painful in the abashed manner with 
which the famous author awaited a school-boy's 
homage — cringing under such contact with con- 
ventional usage, as a school-girl might. 

Yet over and over it happened, that tlie easy, 
outspoken cheeriness — like that of his friend 
Pike or of Ticknor — though of a total stranger, 
would drive off his shrinking habit, and inoculate 
him with a corresponding frankness and jollity. 
A seat adjoining his, for a day or two, at the hotel 
table, gave delightful opportunity for observation. 



248 AMERICAN LANDS &^ LETTERS. 

nor can I ever forget the generous insistence with 
which he urged my going with him for a morning 
call upon the President (from whom he had al- 






ready received his consular appointment) ; and 
the beaming welcome given by his old college 
friend. No one in search of political favor could 
have desired a happier introduction ; and it did 



BANQUETINGS. 249 

happen that the present writer was at that epoch 
— in view of some special historic studies — an 
applicant for a small consular post on the Med- 
iterranean ; and as the place had no pecuniary 
value, and was hence unsought, the path to it 
was made easy and flowery. 

A certain familiarity with the routine of social 
duties of the Liverpool consulate enabled me 
to give to Hawthorne some hints, which were 
eagerly received. The possible calls upon him 
for speech-making, at public (or private) com- 
plimentary dinners loomed before him, even 
then, in terrific shapes. It would not, I think, be 
too much to say, that these awful apprehensions 
cast a leaden hue over his official sky, and over 
all his promise of European enjoyment. We all 
know how bravely he came out of such dread 
experiences, and how he has put his glowing con- 
quest on record in the delightful story of a Lord 
Mayor's Banquet.* 

Yet another and more notable subject of talk, 
I recall, as we sat on a spring eventide, upon a 

* Our Old Home, p. 358. 



250 AMERICAN LANDS &- LETTERS. 

little balcony, which in those days hung out 
from the front of Willard's Hotel and gave 
easy view up and down of the passers-by upon 
the great breadth of Pennsylvania Avenue — 



^ILLASD'^ 




r- I - r" \ / II,- 

/, /' in i. I. in 



\':: "-■ ii>,:r ni.' i m 



Willard's Hotel as it Appeared in the 'Fifties. 

Frotn CI prhit i?; the collection o/ James F. Hood, Esq , of lyashington. 



then innocent of trolleys or of asphalt, and swept 
on occasions with gusty spasms of dust. We had 
dined together ; we had been talking of the 
great success which had attended the issue of his 
more recent books ; possibly the eagerness with 



HAWTHORNE. 251 

which this had been set forth by a young and 
fresh admirer had put him into a warm com- 
municative glow ; possibly the chasse-ennui of a 
little glass of Chartreuse may have added to the 
glow ; however this might be, there certainly 
came to his speech then and there a curiously 
earnest presentment of the claims of authors to 
public favor and to public rewards — whether of 
place or pension. " Who puts such touch to the 
heart-strings of a people ? Who leads them on to 
such climacterics of hope — of courage ? Who 
kneads their sympathies and their passions in 
such masterful grasp ? Isn't this a leadership to 
be reckoned with and to be recognized by some- 
thing more than the paltry purchase of a few 
books, of which the publisher (though he be ex- 
cellent good fellow) is largest beneficiary ? Is it 
not time for a new shuffling of the cards — so 
that if a man can chant as Homer chanted and 
set a score of rhapsodists to the hymning of his 
song through the great cities of the land, he 
should still struggle on — blind and poor — or 
serving as ' Surveyor/ to be ousted on the next 
Ides?'' 



252 AMERICAN LANDS ^ LETTERS. 

— No, I have no right to serve myself with 
quotation marks here, as if I were citing the very 
words of Hawthorne's talk ; ^tis impossible to re- 
call them ; yet the large assertion that he made 
of the dignities and of the reach of the writer's 
influences is still most vivid in my mind.* With- 
al there was no bitterness — no pugnacious jeal- 
ousies — no egoism. It was the talk rather of one 
looking down from skyey heights upon those 
struggling at mundane games for a good footing 
or a winning stroke ; perhaps, too, there was a 
glimmer, here and there, of Mephistophelian mis- 
chief — as if he were testing a fervid young 
listener with a psychologic puzzle. I think he 
loved putting such puzzles to the brains of others 
— all the better if young, and intently watching 
issues. 

That listening to his low, yet impassioned 
words — subtle sometimes, but always clear — and 

*I cite as "in line " with this exuberant talk one of his 
*' notes " (given in the Biography by Julian Hawthorne, 
vol. i. p. 491) — " words, so innocent and powerless are they, 
as standing in a dictionary ; how potent for good or evil they 
become to one who knows how to combine them ! " 



HAWTHORNE. 253 

that vision of his pale noble face catching as he 
talked the last glow of an April twilight — dwells 
with me. Three months after, I saw him again in 
the murky neighborhood of St. Nicholas's chnrch- 
yard in Liverpool, not yet reconciled to the sod- 
den mists of the Lancashire coasts ; and again, 
two years thereafter — at the Adelphi ; wonted now 
to all the fogs and to the juicy sirloins of the Irish 
black cattle, and with the fears of banqueting 
speeches all gone by. His inbred Americanism 
still rampant — nay, sometimes provincially de- 
fiant ; yet love of things English — things, more 
than men — had grown over him ; the ivies of old 
ruins took him graciously in their clasp, and with 
such close hug of their abounding tendrils as he 
did not struggle against. He loved the mosses on 
stones, and on way-sides, and on cottage walls ; 
and if he shrunk from some of the more lusty 
show of British womanhood, he loved the quiet 
fireside virtues and stanchness which adorned it ; 
and came to have dear images of the Old Home 
planted and glowing in his heart. 



254 AMERICAN LANDS b- LETTERS. 

European Life, 

European life made deep markings upon his 
sensitive nature, but he did never struggle to put 
on its costumes or customs ; as his British biog- 
rapher says with a tender complacency — he was 
" exquisitely and consistently provincial/' And 
we say — thank God, he guarded sedulously his 
Americanism ; nor did he take on with any as- 
siduity the '' er's — er's " of Cockney-dom, or the 
dilettanteism of foreign Capitals — with which so 
many expatriated Americans have latterly bap- 
tized their speech and their souls. 

In 1857 Hawthorne resigned his office of consul 
— perhaps weary of service, perhaps doubting if 
the political skies would be benign under the 
new President Buchanan. The emoluments of 
the office, though not so large as hoped for, had 
put him at ease. Mrs. Hawthorne, with health 
disturbed by cool British fogs, had taken a winter- 
ing in summer latitudes. There had been jaunts 
to London, to Scotland, and through all those 
green ways of Warwickshire which so delightfully 
freshened the pages of that book of Our Old 



HAWTHORNE IN ITALY. 255 

Home, which on the score of literary texture is 
among the fairest and daintiest he ever wrote. 

On a cold, sour day of January (1858), he ar- 
rived in Rome, with his family, via Paris and 
Marseilles ; missing greatly the ^' comforts " which 
wrapped him in English homes ; scarce getting 
warmth into his bones, save when the heavy, 
mat-like curtain at the door of St. Peter's flopped 
behind him, and the mild airs of the great temple 
bathed him in their placid serenities. 

Later the currents of his blood were pleasantly 
stirred by the infectious jollities of the Carnival ; 
and still further stirred when, in the spring (1858), 
he encounters the romance-laden winds which 
blow over the Florentine valley ; and from his 
eyrie on the height of Bellosguardo, he looks 
athwart the Arno, and the Brunelleschi dome to 
the hills by Fiesole ; and out of his crumbling 
square tower of Montauto — a little way southward 
from the Porto Romano — filches the romantic ma- 
terial for his new story of Donatello. As the sum- 
mer season waned, he went to Rome again, where 
the Campagna fever smote one of the dearest of 
his flock — a new and bitter experience unfolding 



256 AMERICAN LANDS &- LETTERS. 

for him, as she (the eldest of his daughters) hov- 
ers between life and death. There were friends 
indeed to lend their sympathies ; for he met the 




W. W. Story. 

Storys at Eome, and had hobnobbed over and 
again with that full-brained poet, architect, sculp- 
tor, talker — who had graced so many arts Hwas 
hard to tell in which he was master. General 
Pierce, too, taking his post-presidential range of 



HAWTHORNE IN ROME. 



257 




The Trevi Fountain, Rome. 



travel, had brought his home-like presence into 
the rooms where fever brooded, and into the Roman 
neighborhood where the beat and bubbling of the 
fountain of Trevi throbbed upon the air. Brown- 
ing also, with his world's-man's tact, had won 
upon the heart of Hawthorne ; and so had that 
delicate poetess — sharer of Browning^s home — 
who has brightened the Casa-Guidi windows for 
all who love Italy, or liberty, or poesy. 



258 AMERICAN LANDS &- LETTERS. 

There are many pleasant hours with Motley the 
historian, on a balcony which overlooks the riot 
and joyousness of a Koman Carnival ; and in the 
succeeding spring (1859) he fares away from the 
great city, through the Khone Valley, Switzer- 
land, and Paris, to England. 

Here he devoted himself for four months to 
the re- writing of his Marble Faun * — mostly at a 
little watering-place on the extreme north-eastern 
shore of Yorkshire ; he has his stay, too, at Leam- 
ington and Bath, and a swift w^hirl of ^^the 
season '^ in London. Under date of May 17, 
1860, he says: '''You would be stricken dumb 
to see how quietly I accept a whole string of in- 
vitations, and what is more, perform my engage- 
ments ^uitliout a murmur." 

In the month of June he sailed for America ; 
and with the opening burst of a New England 
summer, found himself again at the " Wayside " 
in Concord. Kampant weeds were growing in 
the little garden ; the clock-like ministrations of 

* The book was published in England under the name of 
Transformation (which he greatly disliked), in February, 
1860. 



HOME AGAIN. 



259 



trained English servants are wanting; mayhap, 
too, there was a silent bemoaning of the lack of 




Hawthorne in 1862. 

From a photograph taken by Brady, in IVashuigton. 



those English domestic appliances (rare then in 
New England country houses) with which the 



26o AMERICAN LANDS &" LETTERS. 

children had known years of dalliance ; more 
than all, those bodeful political mutterings were 
stirring the air, which were to grow in volume 
until the placid America the romancer had 
known, should put on, and wear for years, the 
red robes of war. 



Home Again and the End, 

Residence and travel in England had quick- 
ened all Hawthorne's rural susceptibilities. No 
man indeed, howsoever browbeaten by British 
bounce or arrogance, can come away from a 
long stay in lands of the English, but the thought 
of their tender care for trees and lawns and all 
green and blooming things, will sweeten his 
memories and exalt his rural instincts. Haw- 
thorne made no exception ; he would have strown, 
at least, a handful of the leafy allurements which 
had beguiled him in Warwickshire or Somerset 
about the narrow enclosure by the Wayside ; he 
had even ordered a few trees and shrubs for his 
plantations from abroad ; but the weeds and wild- 
ness were in conquering ranks. Mrs. Lathrop, in 



CONCORD HOME. 



261 



her pleasant '' Memories/' speaks pathetically of 
the ** horrifying delinquencies of our single ser- 




From a photog-rafh ^iven by Hawthorne to the author in the Spring of 1862.* 

vant ; '^ and again ^'^we did not learn to save 

* Of this photograph Hawthorne wrote : *' The enclosed is 
the least objectionable of half a dozen from which I select 
it — all of them being stern, hard, ungenial, and, moreover, 
somewhat grayer than the original." 



262 AMERICAN LANDS &- LETTERS. 

money, because our parents could not." Their 
generous but disorderly charities forbade — would 
have forbidden, even though Consular revenue had 
been doubled. 

The quiet of Concord with its idling rivers and 




Concord River, from Nashawtuc Hill. 

rounded hills has much that is Arcadian ; yet the 
deep gravel cuts which flank the railway, and its 
prevailing growth of birch and of pine do not 
carry large agricultural promise ; nor did Haw- 
thorne's score or more of acres tempt him to 
active husbandry. 

Perhaps the reader may be interested in a 



HAWTHORNE'S FARMING. 263 

paragraph or two from an unpublished letter of 
the romancer relating to this topic — dated a few 
years after his return. The present writer had 
ventured to send him a little book * setting forth 
some of his owni experiences of farm life. After 
acknowledging this with some kindly words of 
praise (of Avhich he was never niggard), he con- 
tinues : 

" I remember long ago your speaking prospectively of a 
farm ; but 1 never dreamed of your being really much more 
of a farmer than myself, whose efforts in that line only 
make me the father of a progeny of weeds in a garden-patch. 
I have about twenty-five acres of land, seventeen of which 
are a hill of sand and gravel, wooded with birches, locusts, 
and pitch pines, and apparently incapable of any other 
growth, so that I have great comfort in that part of my terri- 
tory. The other eight acres are said to be the best land in 
Concord, and they have made me miserable, and would soon 
have ruined me if I liad not determined never more to at- 
tempt raising anything from them. So there they lie along 
the road-side, within their broken fence, an eyesore to me, 
and a laughing-stock to all the neighbors. If it were not for 
the difficulty of transportation by express or otherwise, I 
would thankfully give you those eight acres." 

But he has his walks and his fertile musings 

* My Farm, of Edgewood^ first published in 1863. 














^Zw^a^ 





Facsimile of the first page of tlie foregoing Letter from Hawthorne. 



CONCORD HOME. 265 

along the brow of that pine-clad hill — can see 
thence the approaches to that home, upon whose 
roof-top he has built a clumsy tower-chamber,* 
on whose inner walls he has inscribed the legend : 
''There is no joy but calm/^ Thither he can scud 
for shelter if too much of peripatetic philosophy 
impends; but he always welcomes thv. tread of 
Emerson along the locust walk ; and is often stirred 
into healthier and more bracing moods by the 
sharp, staccato utterances of that keen observer 
and out-of-door man, Thoreau. But his lifted 
chamber is not after all the tower of Montau- 
to ; and there were delightful fashions of growth 
in green Warwickshire that he misses on the 
meadows of Concord. What wonder if seasons 
of mal-aise come to him, now that the beguiling 
European experiences, which had kindled his 
manhood into bursts of mental joyousness, have 
passed forever from his grasp ? What wonder if 

* " I really was not so much to blame here as the village 
carpenter, who took the matter into his own hands and pro- 
duced an unimaginable sort of thing, instead of what I 
asked for. If it Avould only burn down ! But I have no 
such luck." — Hawthorne's letter of April, 1862. 



266 AMERICAN LANDS &^ LETTERS. 

little ailments or annoyauces put — every year — a 
heavier drag upon his march along the wayside 
of life ? What wonder if his imagination is be- 
clouded with colors more and more murky as he 
wrestles with the old brain-webs of a " Dolliver'^ 
or a ''Septimius Felton" ? 

The journeyings of years, and perhaps the 
weeds at his own wayside, gave him yearning for 

new and home travel. 

* 

He goes southward, with his kind, jolly-spirited 
friend Ticknor to cheer and guide him. Ticknor 
is brought back by the undertakers ; * Hawthorne 
follows — alone, trying to be strong and unmoved. 
Once more he journeys — now with his old friend 
President Pierce — his voice shaking when lie bids 
them adieu at his Concord home. 

The friends go northward ; and on the 18th of 
May, 1864 (ten days after the great Battle of the 
Wilderness), reach the Pemigewassett Inn, in the 
pretty valley through which a New Hampshire 
country road trends toward the Franconia Moun- 



* Mr. Ticknor died a few days after setting out upon the 
journey, in Philadelphia (April, 1864). 



HAWTHORNE'S DEATH. 



267 



tains. They had adjoining rooms ; so, twice or 
thrice in the night Pierce steps to the bedside of 
his companion, who seems sleeping quietly — very 
quietly. No change ever came more quietly ; no 
groans, no sighs, no conscious pain even — only 
the gates opened — for this, our great romancer, 
and our greatest master of English prose — and he 
passed through by night. 




Hawthorne's Grave at Sleepy Hollow, Concord. 



CHAPTER V. 

WE lingered long in onr last chapter — but 
who shall venture to say unduly — over 
the career of that master who put a Scarlet Let- 
ter ineffaceably upon the history of the land. 
We traced him from his childish home in the 
quaint Salem house (still standing) to the wilds 
of Sebago Lake, where a maternal uncle gave 
him the run of great woods ; and thence to the 
near college of Bowdoin, where the suave Dr. 
Allen, of the Biographical Dictionary, presided, 
and two brothers Abbott found the Way to do 
Good; where also Bridge and General Pierce, 
in their young days, befriended Hawthorne, and 
where the Rev. George Cheever learned to slash 
with sharp rhetoric at unbelievers, slave-mongers 
and Distillery folk. 

Again we followed the Master to Salem, and to 

the gauging of barrels on Boston wharves ; then 

268 



HA WTHORNE. 269 

that pretty episode of Brook Farm came, where a 
Countess Ossoli flashed into view, and that pret- 
tier episode of love-making, which ended with the 
cooing of doves in an '^ Old Manse '' of Concord. 
Next came another Salem experience, when the 
Master scored the corridors of the old Custom- 
house with portraits of hangers-on, and followed 
this with a retreat to Lenox woods, where Sedg- 
wicks chirped and Herman Melville strode mys- 
tically on the scene. George Hillard, too, brought 
sometimes his serenities and keen tastes thither- 
ward ; and later, at Concord again, in company 
with the wise Emerson and the gracious James T. 
Fields, he buoyed up the Master's spirits when 
they drooped ; and all gave joint huzza when the 
Blithedale story-teller sailed away for England 
and '^good pay/' 

We saw him there; he lingered there under 
the mists and smoke by the belfry of St. Nicholas 
in Liverpool ; and under leafy streets in Leam- 
ington ; and again on roads in Italy, where Story 
cracked his jokes and told of Roha di Roma; and 
where the sweet small voice of Mrs. Browning 
smote upon the ear of reverent listeners. There- 



270 AMERICAN LANDS &- LETTERS. 



after came the sorrowful waits upon Campagnan 
fever — the return — the small Concord make-shifts 

for the scenes and 
verdure, and tower of 
Bellosguardo — the 
sinking spirits — the 
little vain bursts of 
home travel — the 
poignant pen, eager 
but trembling, with 
the ink sj^lashes that 
only half figured a 
Dr. Dolliver — all this 
put out of sight by 
the entire completed 
tale of Monte Beni, 
where four figures 
reign. 

Only four, who en- 
ter upon the first 
page of the Marble Faun, and never vanish till the 
curtain drops on that great gloom-haunted back- 
ground, where Roman dirges sound and Roman 
temples and tall houses block the soft Italian 




Hilda's Tower. 



A NATURALIST, 271 

sunshine. Virtually, only these four figures — 
lovely Hilda, transplanted from New England 
fields, with a pearly flash of Puritanism playing 
on her forehead ; Kenyon — the masculine half of 
Saxon elements, at play in Etruscan fields ; Mir- 
iam — all a-glitter with jewels of beauty and the 
shimmer of some mysterious coronet, flashing 
blood-red; last, Donatello — Arcadian, graceful, 
bewitching, with an engaging ductility, and only 
such little glow of humanity as steals upon re- 
flected rays from the blood-red coronet of Miriam. 

A Naturalist 

In my report of those last days of Hawthorne 
at Concord, there is casual mention of an investi- 
gating, yet much younger, man, who from time to 
time found welcome at the AVayside. He was of 
Concord birth, but by inheritance he united the 
blood of a Norman ancestry with Puritan sever- 
ities, and also Scottish gumption with Quakerish 
stubbornness. This was Henry Thoreau ; * his 

* Henry D. Thoreau, b. 1817; d. 1862. A Week on Con- 
cord and Merrimac Rivers^ 1845-47 ; Walden^ 1854. Biog- 



272 AMERICAN LANDS ^ LETTERS. 

father, failing in other means of livelihood, had 
become a pencil manufacturer ; in this, the son 
joined him for a time, but having learned to make 
pencils better than anyone else could make them, 
he lost interest in the craft. So, when he had 
learned in Walden woods to live upon less money 
than other men, he lost interest in the experi- 
ment. His thought ranged above money-making ; 
yet he was keen-sighted, lithe as an Indian, and 
almost as swart and hale. In many points he 
might have posed for Hawthorne^'s Donatello, 
while the exuberance and force of his love for 
nature would have almost made one look curiously 
for fawn-tips on his ears. If somewhat Pagan 
in his belief, he was not Pagan in lassitudes. 
Withal he was a scholar — had graduated with 
good rank at Harvard — was apt, and specially 
appreciative in classic ranges, but disposed to be 
jealous and contemptuous of that side of classi- 
cism which tended to pride of learning, and which 

raphies.^ by Wm. Ellery Channing and F B. Sanborn, are 
marred by over-praise; Alger {Solitude) and Lowell, on the 
other hand, in their biographic mention are somewhat prone 
to detraction. 



HENRY THOREAU. 



273 




Henry D. Thoreau. 

Front a crayon drawing by Rowse. 

made the accomplishment of the Sir William Tem- 
ples ; yet, if a cricket chirped in his ear, as he scuf- 
fled with his hoe in his bean-patch, he harked back 

straight to the Cicada of Anacreon, like a Greek. 
18 



274 AMERICAN LANDS &- LETTERS. 

Thoreau is probably best known to the world by 
that curious experience of his in Concord, where 
he built his own house under the pines — measur- 
ing costs by pennies, illustrating a great many idle 




Walden Pond. 

economies, coquetting with the birds, having 
friendships with the squirrels and woodchucks, 
living abstemiously, measuring with nicety every 
depth and shallow of his watery domain of Wal- 
den — which he finds deepest where the diameters 



WALDEN HOME. 275 

of breadth and length intersect. This seems to us 
not a great discovery ; yet, observe how character- 
istically he twists it into solution of ethical prob- 
lems : 

" Such a rule [of the two diameters] not only guides toward 
the sun in its system and the JieaH in man^ but draws lines 
through the length and breadth of the aggregate of a man's 
particular daily behaviors and waves of life, into his coves 
and inlets, and where they intersect will be the height or 
depth of his character." 

This tempts to a new sounding of motives, and 
to a question — if the mixing of Norman blood 
with English Puritanism, and Scotch covenanting 
sharpness in this philosopher of the woods, may not 
suggest new ways of measuring the shallows and 
depths of the composite New England character? 
It is an altogether curious figure — this acute 
man of the mixed nativities, and with the rhythms 
of such as Simonides singing in his ear — makes 
there, upon the Walden shores — giving furtive 
'^tips^' to the birds and the squirrels — shrugging 
his shoulders contemptuously at any buzz of civil- 
ized sounds, and on the alert for the thunder of 
some falling tree or the creak of ice-cakes which 
grind out their chorus to cheer his solitude. 



276 AMERICAN LANDS &- LETTERS. 

Reformer and Writer. 

But he tires of it, and goes to village life again ; 
has his voyagings up and down the Assabet or the 
Concord among the rushes and overhanging wild- 




Desk, Bed, and Chair used in the Hut at Walden Pond. 

No-w in the possession of the Antiqicariatt Society of Concord. 

vines — has his bouts at school-keeping — his linger- 
ings, and listenings at the Emerson home (where- 
by he possibly falls into certain imitative modes 
of thought or talk — as weaker men will always 
plunge unwittingly into the foot-falls of stronger 



THOREAU AS REFORMER. 277 

ones who go before through wastes) ; he lectures, 
too, year after year, there in Concord and other 
near places — always having something earnest 
and piquant to say, but not alluring crowds ; mis- 
doubting always what the world calls success, and 
scorning applause as the perquisite of weak men. 

Throughout he was an arch-reformer ; insistent 
upon largest liberties in home, in state, in church ; 
setting a man^s individuality at the top of creeds 
and law ; going to jail rather than pay taxes he 
thought unjust ; riotously applausive when that 
stanchest of radicals and most illogical of human- 
itarians, Ossawatomie Brown, bundled his pikes 
into the Virginia mountains, and preached his 
gospel of revolt ; and when the cruel but lawful 
and logical end came to that humane furor with 
the drop of the Charlestown gallows, it stirred 
Thoreau, as it did many another perfervid and 
waiting soul, into those resentments which ended 
in a desolating and renovating war. 

One can hardly know this author, except by 
reading him thoroughly, up and down and across, 
in every light, every season, every labor. The 
truths of nature quiver in his talk, as color quivers 



278 AMERICAN LANDS &- LETTERS. 

on a chameleon ; and when we have caught the 
changing tints — by how much are we wiser ? 
Full-paced naturalists tell us that he is not al- 
ways to be relied upon for naming of common 
facts ; and the uncommon ones in his story are 
largely so, because they radiate (for the time) his 
shine of emotion, of impulse, of far-away compari- 
sons. Yet what tender particularity in his Ex- 
cursions — not showing us great wonders ; no 
more does White of Selborne ; yet what large 
country love and yearning ! 'Tis a grandchild, 
telling us of the frosty beard and the quaking 
voice of the grandpapa. 

How true is that snowy foliage of his — ''^ an- 
swering leaf for leaf to its summer dress ! " Even 
indoors his loving observation does not pause ; 
but — 

'^ Upon the edge of the melting frost of the window, the 
needle-shaped particles are bundled together so as to re- 
semble fields waving with grain, or shocks rising here and 
there from the stubble." — Excursions^ p. 67. 

TJioreau^s Later Reputation, 
Unlike many book-making folk, this swart, 
bumptious man has grown in literary stature since 



THOREAU'S QUALITIES. 279 

his death ; his drawers have been searched, and 
cast-away papers brought to day. Why this re- 
newed popularity and access of fame ? Not by 
reason of newly detected graces of style ; not for 
weight of his dicta about morals, manners, letters; 
there are safer guides in all these. But there is 




Thoreau's Flute, Spyglass, and Copy of Wilson's 
Ornithology. 



a new-kindled welcome for the independence, the 
tender particularity, and the outspokenness of 
this journal-maker. 

If asked for a first-rate essayist, nobody would 
name Thoreau ; if a poet, not Thoreau ; if a 
scientist, not Thoreau ; if a political sage, not 
Thoreau ; if a historian of small socialities and of 
town affairs, again not Thoreau. Yet we read 



28o AMERICAN LANDS &> LETTERS. 

him — with zest, though he is sometimes prosy, some- 
times overlong and tedious ; but always — Thoreau. 

The same unique interest belongs to the blare of 
Whitman, to the crookedest things of Browning, 
to Carlyle at his ugliest. These men do not train 
in bands ; they are not safest of critics ; they do 
not get set up as exemplars in young ladies' col- 
leges ; they do not adorn the anthologies of Miss 
Prim and of teachers. But they are alive ; they 
think ; they break rules — but they also break 
tedium, and stupid meandering in the light of my 
lady's grammatic enforcements. They have pulse 
and a buoyant life, that engages. 

There is good appetite for a man's speech who 
has the courage to be himself. We love to lay hold 
of his nodosities and angularities, when he makes 
no concealment and does not weary and embrute 
himself for half his life in trying to cover them 
up or to round them down. That a man should 
take to a hut and give over bath-tubs, confits, 
prim clothes, and conventionalism, is not in itself 
matter of interest or a tone of conduct that would 
pique curiosity or study ; but that he should do 
this honestly, straightforwardly, consistently, in 



THOREAU. 



2Sl 



the evolution of a system of what he reckons 
humane conduct of life — this makes the matter 
curious and entertaining. It approaches (in a 
humble way, indeed) that other honest human 




Thoreau's Grave. 

experience, justified by its story, which was set 
forth many generations ago in Gascony, by the 
Sieur Michel de Montaigne. 

But I cannot linger longer with the sage of 
Walden, who sang and philosophized, and played 
the flute and broke the laws. Emerson has said 



282 AMERICAN LANDS &- LETTERS. 

of him at his funeral (1862), in sweet and tender 
words of consecration — better worth than the 
heaped-up praises of a biographer — ^^ Wherever 
there is knowledge, wherever there k virtue, 
wherever there is beauty, he will find a home/^ 

A Poet's Youth, 

Among those we encountered at Bowdoin Col- 
lege in the twenties was a ruddy- faced, engaging 
lad * who came from Portland — who was born in 
a great house, still standing on the edge of the 
water, and who had by nature poetic graces and 
aptitudes, and grew to a love of languages, and 
of their billowy flow from all tongues. In his 
early teens some of his verse finds lodgement in 
the corners of Portland journals ; he stands fairly 
in his class, nourishing very ambitious hopes ; 
" I will be eminent in something," he writes to 
his father (date of 1824), and pleads for a year of 

* Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, b. 1807 ; d. 1882. Voices 
of the Nighty 1839 ; Evangeline^ 1847 ; Hiawatha^ 1853 ; 
Dante^ 1867-70 ; Biography^ mainly made up of extracts 
from his letters and journals (by Samuel Longfellow), 2 
vols., 8vo, 1886, and Final Memorials^ 1 vol., 1887. 



LONGFELLOW. 283 

post-graduate study at Harvard, where he says 
"1183 per annum" will pay all expenses.* 

The father, who is a discreet man of high repu- 
tation — though he looks askance at the '^pretty 




House in Portland, Me., in which Longfellow was Born. 

poems " — does favor the further graduate course ; 
all the more when the authorities at Bowdoin hint 
at a ''chair of modern languages" for the son, 
if he will equip himself by a year or two of study 
abroad. 



* Biography^ vol. i., p. 59,, 



284 AMERICAN LANDS &^ LETTERS. 

This opened liis career ; in May, 1825, he set 
off for 'New York, to take ship for Europe. Per- 
haps the coach went by the Colonial Tavern at 
Sudbury — who knows ? Certainly he went by 
Northampton, where the master of the Round 
Hill school gaye him letters ; thence to Albany 
— a curious up-country divergence ! — perhaps to 
have the delights of that sail down the Hudson. 
His ship is delayed ; so he coaches to Philadelphia, 
where he catches one glimpse of that ancient 
hospital, under whose roof, twenty years later, he 
brings about the last sad meeting of Gabriel and 
Evangeline. 

We can fancy what that European trip may 
have been for a youth of nineteen — full of poetic 
fervors — loving gayeties — rusticating at Auteuil — 
meeting Cooper and Lafayette in Paris — supping 
with Washington Irving and Alexander Everett 
in Madrid — dancing with Cordovan girls — linger- 
ing in Spain for months, and wintering upon the 
Piazza Santa Maria Novella at Florence. 

For three years it is all a holiday ; yet he does 
not forget his task-work or his ambitions ; Outre- 
mer is simmering in his thought ; and with its 



LONGFELLOW, 285 

pretty podrida of old tales, dashes of senti- 
ment, glowing descriptions (all set aglow by 
memories of Geoifrey Crayon, of Sterne's Joiir- 
ney, and of Childe Harold), does not have final 
outcome in book form until some years after his 
return.* 

In 1828 he is in Venice — " most wonderful 
city ; " a twelvemonth later at Dresden and Got- 
tingen, and in the same year returns to Maine, 
where he is Professor at Bowdoin ; and in 1831 he 
is wived and domiciled in a house of Brunswick. 
But the horizon seems small there for a young 
man of his ambitions ; and at a hint from Presi- 
dent Quincy that his name has been favorably 
considered for the Professorship of Modern Lan- 
guages at Harvard (from which George Ticknor 
is about to retire), he gives up his place at Bow- 
doin (1835) and sails again over seas to equip 
himself with a knowledge of the northern lan- 
guages of Europe. 

Then comes a rich burst of Scandinavian travel, 
among the drooping firs, and the "white-haired 



• First number issued in 1833 ; second in 1834 ; in com- 
pleted book form (Harpers), 1835. 



286 AMERICAN LANDS &- LETTERS. 

boys ; " this fills the summer, and in November 
his young wife dies in Rotterdam. "■ His house- 
hold gods were broken." But there came consol- 
ing travel up and down the Rhine and in the 
shadows of the Swiss mountains. And upon the 
very fore-front of that Romance (of Hyperion) 
over whose melancholies his spirit is brooding — 
to wipe out sorrows of his own — stand recorded 
those words of a German master he loved : 
^^ Look not mournfully into the Past. It 
comes not back again. Wisely improve the 
Present.'"' 

Those who read Hyperion in their young days 
(it first appeared in 1839) will remember with 
something like a thrill, how, amid its lesser 
charms of laughing vineyards, mountain pictures, 
rollicking student songs, and tender, sorrowful 
musings, there gleamed now and then across its 
pages (as when the serene Mary Ashburton ap- 
pears) the glow of a stronger, purer light, 
promising calm and rest I Yet this light van- 
ishes as it came, leaving the hero Paul Flemming 
wrapt in gloom. 



LONGFELLOW. 



287 



A Harvard Professor. 

In December of 1836 Longfellow wavS estab- 
lished in Cambridge. Judge Story was still in 
the law school : 
Charles Sumner 
came thither to 
lecture ; George 
Hillard was at 
hand for evening 
talks or smokes ; 
so was that j oi- 
liest of Greek 
professors^ F el- 
ton, with wit 
always sparkling 
through his 
glasses. Bowen 
and Sparks are 
grubbing indus- 
triously at their documentary work ; both the 
older and younger Wares had their pleasant 
preachments ; poor Follen — who perished in a 
burning Sound steamer (Lexington) four years 




Professor, later President, Felton, 
of Harvard. 



288 AMERICAN LANDS &- LETTERS. 

later — could give the young professor *^ points^* 
in German ; and the elderly and dignified Wash- 
ington Allston was still residing at the ^' Port/' 
able and willing to compare notes about the 
Laocoon and the charms of the Pitti palace. 

The next year (1837) he rents two chambers in 
that famous Craigie House (where he died) ; his 
lectures are popular ; his spirits jubilant ; his 
health excellent ; his expectations all of the 
rosiest. Bright poems from his pen, with a 
fresh accent, find their way into journals and 
annuals far and near. Chief est among these are 
those tender and solemn-sounding Voices of the 
Night which in the year 1839 were assembled in 
a little drab-colored volume that to-day stands on 
my shelves, and was bought upon its issue, with 
admiring zest, in Sophomore days at Yale. 

That book had great vogue with young stu- 
dents, and its 

VTTVoSoTUpa TWl' TroXvTTOVOiV (SpOTWV 

caught a gay scansion from many an enthusiast 
who was not given to Greek in general. Perhaps 
there was not the light of any new fire in those 



HYPERION. 289 

beguiling verses. If Noali Webster bad put the 
thoughts shrined in them into the sturdy prose 
with which he tokl about the ^^ Farmer and the 
Boy Who Stole His Apples," they would have 
proved blank shots. The wording and the method 
made the brilliancy and the barb. Consider for 
a moment what would have become of Chancery's 
daintiest tales if a N^oah Webster had dealt them 
out with his economy of phrase ; or, who would 
watch for the stars shooting athwart Heaven if 
they carried in their trail only the dull tints of 
meteoric iron ? 

It was counted not a little remarkable by boys 
in other colleges — that a professor on the banks 
of the Charles, who could, and did, talk learnedly 
about Italian grammar, should yet stoop to the 
brilliant tracery (in verse) of the Footsteps of the 
Angels, and splice out his Hyperion with rollick- 
ing songs about the ''Leathery Herr Papa" — 
while we were following up our great officials in 
" Day on the Will," or a pretty problem in Alge- 
bra ! What wonder if there should come about 
a literary florescence in the neighborhood of the 

Washington Elm, at Cambridge, which did not 
19 



290 AMERICAN LANDS &^ LETTERS. 

make gay the soberer lands and Division-rooms to 
the southward ? 

In all these years of his earlier Harvard profess- 
orship, Longfellow is full of his Academic and 
literary industries — keeping his enthusiastic 
students abreast of him in the march over edu- 
cational courses and busy with romance and poem 
— so busy and so Avorn that he is compelled to 
take a run, in 1842, to the baths of ^Marienburg, 
in Germany. From this trip he brings back that 
high-flying marker of the Belfry of Bruges, also 
the so-called '' Slavery Poems/^ and sundry notes 
forecasting his Trilogy of Christus. 

In 1843 he married the daughter of an esteemed 
and wealthy merchant of Boston. Thencefor- 
ward the Craigie House, with its Washington 
memories and its outlying green fields, stretching 
to the Charles River, became the poet's permanent 
home — notable for its tasteful equipments and for 
those gracious hospitalities which for so many 
years made all its doors and windows beam with 
summery welcomes. There were those who 
thought they saAV in the new and dignified 
mistress of this home a likeness to the shadowy, 




ho 



oT 

a 

o 



C 

o 



3 

o 









LONGFELLOW, 293 

elusive, graceful figure of that ^^ Mary Aslibur- 
ton/' which had flitted coyly over some of the 





m^ ^j«**»- ■ 


LJ .iHj^ 




Wm 


L 


B 








Vp 








"W^W 




■w 


^^'j' 




if 



Mrs. Longfellow. 

Frofn a reproduction oj Rowse's crayon portrait.* 

tenderer pages of Hyperion — perhaps their sus- 
picions may have been well grounded. 



* In the Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Hough- 
ton, Mifflin & Co. 



294 AMERICAN LANDS 5^• LETTERS. 

Later Work and Yeai^s. 

There comes another swift trip to Europe for 
this poet, on whom Fortune would seem to have 
showered its favors. Lesser poems, such as the 
*' Village Blacksmith/' or the " Skeleton in 
Armor/"* make their winning assonance heard 
from time to time ; and in 1847 comes the larger 
music of Evangeline, in which he sweeps on 
broad caesural, hexameter pinions, from the fir- 
fretted valleys of Acadia j:o the lazy, languorous 
tides which surge silently through the bayous of 
Louisiana. 

There was an outcry at first — that this poem 
showed classic affectation ; but the beauty and the 
pathos carried the heroine and the metre into all 
hearts and homes in all English-speaking lands. 
The Hiaivatha came later^ but not by many years ; 
and this again called out the shrill salute of a 
good many of those critics who ^'^shy'' at any 
divergence from the conventionalities by which 
their schools are governed, and who took captious 
exceptions to a metre that was strange ; but the 
laughing waters of Minnehaha and the pretty 



LONGFELLOW. 



295 




Longfellow at the Age of Forty-four. 

Frofn an cuj^ravzHg' l<y IV. H. Mole, ttiade in London, in 18^1. 

legendary texture of this Indian poem have car- 
ried its galloping trochaic measure into all cul- 
tivated American households. Hiaicatha did 



296 AMERICAN LANDS &- LETTERS. 

not appear, however (1855), until its author had 
given over his labors as a teacher, and was resting 
upon the laurels which had grown all round that 
Cambridge home. The pretty tale of Kavan- 
agh, of earlier date, ranked fairly with his other 
ventures in the field of prose fiction — all of them 
wearing the air of poems gone astray — bereft of 
their rhythmic robes, and showing a lack of the 
brawn and virility which we ordinarily associate 
with the homely trousers of prose. 

After his retirement from the Chair of Modern 
Languages (to which Lowell had been named suc- 
cessor, 1855), under the ceaseless labors of which 
Longfellow had grown restive, he could give more 
time and an unburdened conscience to his Chris- 
tian Trilogy and to his dealings with Dante. 
There was occasional high disport, too — as of a 
boy loose from school — in such j^layful fancies 
as that of Miles Standish and his courtship, and 
that later engarlanding of tales which he wove 
together about the Old Sudbury Inn. It was a 
delightful leap away from things academic, and 
admitted of that frolic — of wintry flame— of love 
notes, and of legendary magic, which put this 









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298 AMERICAN LANDS &' LETTERS. 



bundle of enkindling stories to the illumination 
of many a fireside circle. They may indeed, and 

will — always, I think 

— call to mind certain 
other Canterhury Tales 

— which is a pity ! The 
thrush may and does 
sing delightfully ; but 
if the memory of the 
joyous, rollicking roun- 
delay of the Bob - 0' - 
Lincoln obtrudes be- 
tween the notes — 'tis 
bad for the thrush. As 
for the Opera magna — 
as he counted them, it 
is not needful ;to speak : 

the Christus, with its Golden Legend, will always 
be valued for its scholarly ranges and for its 
pleasantly recurring poetic savors. It hardly 
seems up to the full score of his purpose or of his 
ambitions ; monkish ways are laid down tenderly, 
as they wended through mediaeval wastes ; and 
so are Christ-ways of later and lightsomer times : 




H. W. Longfellow. 

From a plioto^rapJi i>i the collection 
of Mr. Peter Gilsey. 







c 
o 



LONGFELLOW'S DANTE. 301 

but there is no careering blast of Divine wind 
sweeping through the highways all, and clearing 
them of putrescent dusts. 

For kindred reasons I cannot share in many 
of the higher estimates which have been placed 
upon the poet's Dantean labors. Scholarship, lov- 
ing care, and conscientious study are lavished in 
abundance ; lingual graces are not lacking ; nor 
technical power to match measure for measure. 
But back of all there seems to be large want of 
effective kinship, in this kindly, serene, studious — 
yet joyous New Englander — with that intense, sol- 
dierly, deep-thoughted Italian — whose Beatrice 
was a rich, swift dream of his youth, and Flor- 
ence, the fair city, with its hopes and splendors, a 
dream of all his years. It was not for the grace- 
ful scholar and the meditative master of Cam- 
bridge life to march with a tread that should 
echo afar, and with a clang of armor that might 
shake the walls of Erebus, into the shades where 
dwell the Blessed and the Damned. Not for him 
to court those solemn meetings with the august 
dead, or with the great criminals seething in the 
gulf of torments and telling of their woes and 



302 AMERICAN LANDS &- LETTERS. 

wickedness. In short, Dante was quite other than 
Longfellow — so largely other, and different, that 
the delicate verse of the latter seems to me to glide 
over the passionate, divinely wrought lines of the 
Italian, as a skater glides over ice — nowhere cut- 
ting to the depths — nowhere breaking through 
the rhetorical crust, under which the floods riot 
and writhe. 

But why make ungracious comparisons ? The 
maker of an Inferno is maker of an epoch ; and 
this Cambridge poet of ours who tells deft stories 
of the old Sudbury Inn, and measures in beguiling 
and unmatchable strain the blessings of " Resig- 
nation," and who, arm-in-arm with an idealized 
Evangeline, traverses the land from end to end, 
has thereby lifted the weight of sorrow from so 
many grieving ones, and put such a lifting and 
consoling joyousness into the spirits of so many 
thousands, that we call down benisons on him and 
revere his name and his memory. 

It was a placid and serene life that the poet 
lived ; he had the love and respect of pupils 
whenever and wherever he taught ; his friends 
were multiplied year by year ; only once — in 



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H. W. Longfellow. 



WHITTIER. 305 

Foe's uncanny day, did he suffer from the stabs of 
ungracious criticism ; the toils of poverty or the 
harrowing constraints of narrowed means never 
wrapt him in ; always that wide^ generous home 
was his own — always open to hospitalities that 
kindled in him new vigor. Only once a grief 
burst upon him which was without its nepenthe ; 
'twas when the benign womanly presence which 
had blessed his heart and his household was swept 
away, before his very eyes, and his unavailing strug- 
gles — in a cloud of fire and smoke — into darkness ! 
A world of readers, far and near, shared in 
that grief. And when the labors, whose pursuit 
mitigated and assuaged the great sorrow, w^ere 
done, and he, too, passed away, there were thou- 
sands, both in America and in England, who felt, 
with a sinking of the heart, that a good friend 
and a melodious singer had gone. 

Another Neio Englander, 

Another, yet of a different strain and mould, 
was that poet * of Maud Mnller and many other 

* John G. Whittier, b. 1807 ; d. 1894. Legends of New 
England (first book), 1831; Songs of Labor^ 1850; Snow 
20 



3o6 AMERICAN LANDS &- LETTERS. 

unforgetable stories, who was born in that angle of 
Massachusetts where the Merrimac, weary of its 
toil among spindles, finds its way, near the old 
town of Newburyport, into the sea. The farm to 





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Whittier's Birthplace, East Haverhill, Mass. 

whose lands and labors he was heir, lay in the 
town of Haverhill, along a pretty stream which 
was tributary to the Merrimac, and which he has 
photographed in lines that can never lose color : 

Bound., 1866 ; Complete Works, 1888 ; Life, by Underwood, 
and fuller biography by S. T. Pickard, 2 vols., 1894. 



WHITTIER. 307 

" Woodsy and wild and lonesome 
The swift stream wound away, 
Through birches and scarlet maples, 
Flashing in foam and spray." 

From the hills which he knew in his childhood 
he could see in fair weather Agamenticus and 
Monadnock to the north, and on the east the 
glimmer of the ocean, from Salisbury beach to the 
rocks of Cape Anne. 

Whittier as a lad was tall, but not over-strong, 
with large eyes, deep set in their orbits and full of 
expression. Those eyes never ceased to challenge 
attention, and could of themselves question one or 
make reply. His boyish experiences taught him 
of all farm labors ; he could milk the cows, or fell 
trees, or cradle grain. His school opportunities 
were small, but he grappled them with a rare 
persistence. The strong Quaker strain of blood 
in him brought with it a love for straightforward- 
ness, for plainness and simplicity of speech and 
conduct, which he never outgrew : but — what 
was more rarely a product of Quakerism — there 
was born in him an instinct for rhyme and poetic 
illuminations of thought, which broke out of him 



3o8 AMERICAN LANDS &- LETTERS. 

as easily as the dapples of snn and shadow broke 
upon the Powow River. He was humane, too ; 
Bnrns's field-mouse touched him as tenderly as 
the Scotsman's rhythm ; all suffering things and 
all captives made quick appeal to him, and he 




Whittier's House at Danvers, Mass. 

wreaked their woes in lines that always carried 
flavors of New England woods and waters. 

Some of these lines catch the attention of 
Garrison, the arch agitator, only two or three 
years his senior, who goes to visit him among his 
cows — and gives to him the earliest of those en- 



NEW-EWGLA^TD WEEHJLY 



VOL. III. 



HARTFORD, CON. >IONDAY, JVLiV 26. 1830. 



ntW-BllaUiHD WEEKLY REVIEW, 

IIANMEK «£ PHELPS, 

./!*• Sl.K-H.mt. 

J. G WHITTIER, EoiTot. 

T£R»U-T...p«:i.l)triinlh.cilT. ..aio 



THE REVIEW. 



BauftJii'k' 'heci 
AdJ •ilf.illy heli.»ir 



■ CbBi 



If then ii any «ct wtiich de«r»e» <l«p 
and bitler condpcnnjtion. il i« ihal uf 'ri- 
flinff wilb the iti«»litnillef'flo( woroaii's 
iffeclion. Th» ffm:ile b«»rl m»7 be com- 
pared 10 a delicate birp— o»er which ihe 
breilhinei of early affection nandcr. unltl 
each tender chord it awakened to tonei of 



itb « ftrong; heart to mingle t*ilh the 
loald — fiirdcd vtith pride and impelled 
forward by ambition. He lound ib« world 
cold, and callous, and selfish, and his otrn 
insensibly look ihe hue of those 
ftround hio). He shut bis eyes upon the 
pall — it was too pure and mildl> beauliful 
for the ilerner£ize of hu mitjhooJ. He 
forgot tbe pa>.*ion of his boyhood— all 
beautiful and holy aJ it was — he turned not 
hack to the young and to*tIy and dewoled 
girl, who had poured out to him m Ihe con- 
fiding earnestness of womarv's confidence 
wealth of her sQeclion. He came 
back to fulfil tbe vow which he bad 
pliehled. 
Slowly and painfully the knowledge of 
\t lover's infidelity came over the sens*- 
.-e heart of Emily She spught for a 
ne to shut out Ihe liurrille iui>picion from 
t rsitid— she half doubled the evidence 
of her own •'ensei— ihe could not believe 
\t WIS a'tnilor— forhct mtmory had 
jred every token of his affection— e»- 
npas^iored wnrd and every endi 



<e (Table 



Ilistbe r 



•out which il Ibui called forth— a 
iiteeleMban the fall of fountains 
sonf of Houri in (be Hosier ' " 



of the 



r lb< 



THE FAREWELL. 



sight thy loDc 500H bye 



of his tendpi 



but ibt 



me at last— tjje doubtful spectre which 
ad lunB haunted her ; and from which she 



had I 



>look 



. for Ihe dalicale fashioning of that 
harp if ■ chanje pan over the love which 
first Mlled forth iu hiddeo harmoDiei.— 
Let fwttecl and cold uukindneii sweep 
over ita d«licalt atrings.and they will break 
otM after another— ilow I jr perhaps- but 
iuraly. Unviiiled and unrequited by the 
light of love. tbeaouM'ke melody mil be 
buihad JB lb* alricken boioin— like the 
myiltrioglhsnnony of the Egyptian Siat- 
«. befort tbe coming of Ihe lunriie. 

I ba>* been wandering amoTig the gravel 
—the lonely and loletnn graves. I love 
at timet to do to. I feel a melancholy not 
unallitd to pleaiufi in communing »vilh 
the resting place of those who have gone 
teforc me— to go forth alone among the 
thronged tombitnues, rising from ei 
grassy undulaiiun like the ghostly n 
Mil of the dtparlcd. And when I k 
above Ihe narrow maiuion of one whom 1 
have known and loved in life. I feel 
airange aiiurance that ih« ap"" ''f >■'« 
elecp«r i» near me-a vicwieii and mimi- 
lering angal. I'- '*• » beautiful philosophy, 
which ha« found \H way uniougbt (or and 
mysteriously itUo tbe ailence of my heart— , 
end if il be only a dream— the unreal im- 
agery of fancy— I pray God. that I ntay 
Mver awaken from lb* beaiili'^ul delusion 

I have been Ihii evening by the grave 
of Eftily. It hai • plain white tombstone, 
l.tif hidden by flnwert. and you may read 
ill mournful epitaph in the dear moon- 
tight, which falls upon it like Ihe smile of 
an Aiigel, ihroueh ai. opening in Ihe dr.rtip- 
ing branchcf. Kimly was a beaiiliful girl- 
Ihe faireit of our villitge tnaideni. I ihmk 
t tee l>er now, as tbe looked 
loved one—the idol of ber alTecl 
Mar bcr with his imile of con< 
«mph and eiultinc I«»e. She bad then 
teen hut eighteen lumincrt, and her wholt 
1>einc seemed woven of lb* dream of hei 
fill! patiion. The «hj«ci of her love was i 
proud and wiywarJ befhg— whose haugh 
ly ipirit never lelaiej from ill habitual 
•lemnctt, lave when he found hi 
the pretence of the young and beautiful 
•feature, who had trusted ber all on th 
•eenture of her vow.' and who lovej hu 
with the confiding earnestness yf a pui 
tDd dtvekd beart. Nature bad deprived 



ool before h'r a dreadful 
id uneica^able vision of reality. There 
as one burst of passionate tcan— the 
i-cr-flow of that fountain of affliction 
hich quenches tbe lail ray of hope in tbe 
desolate bosom.— and she wai calm— for 
the itruggle was over, and she gaied stead- 
ily and vtith tbe awful confidence of one 
ivho5e hopes are nut of Earth, opon the 
dark Valley of Death, whose shadow was 
Iready around her. 
It was a, beautiful evening of Summer, 
that I taw her for the last time. The lun 
was just letting bet.md a long line of blue 
and undulating hilli.louching :heir tall sum- 
mils with a radiance like the halo which 
circlei the daiilmg brow of an Angel— 
and all Nature bad put on the rich gi 
ture of greenness anil blossom. As I 
preached the quiet and secluded dwelling 
ol the once happy Emily — I found the 
door of the little parlour thrown open 
and a female voice of a •weelneH, which 
could hardly he said to belong to Earth, 
ilole out upon ihc soft Summer air. Il was 
like Ihe breathing of an jColian lute to the 
gentlest visitation of the Zephyr. Invol- 
untarily I paused to listen — and Ibese 
WA«4, — I i,h«|l never (orget ibem—came 
up<K< my ear like liie ICW and miUn- 
cholj music, wbicb we aomttimei hear in 






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Aod thou wi 
Tbee.'i. 

Foirhoeei 
Ot fe»eru 



For Hope ^ni F.i 



Ti. k.ode 


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Ol (rie 


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Tb. bob. 


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a Icot thy bro 
mfmory, wh 



the voice of Emily-i: was h. 
Uii lonf, She ww leaning on tbe lofa ; 



J. G 



(F/om tf,t Uarbv.gtr of Ftait} 
CAUSE OP PEACE. 

Many there are, doubtless, who will e 
:laim.- How fruitless are all attempts 
>rumole concord amongst men ; ihe hum 
lean ii. and ever will be, the slave of t 



>l diffusion off 
ales the world 
'^hedark plai 



Trade. 



uld 



ces the gloom ol 
arlh, the habiU- 



ty the talents of thi 
..b'les of the femalL 
exerted in behalf oi 
fie was a solitary la^ 
le one case which i: 
otber, it is thechangt 
humanity, which ha< 
ubjecl of the 9h 



be thought of 



ch laofTuage as the follo' 

' Alricanswho had been ■niu^ii u>t:r- 
ilive : " Tbe oiMier left to ihe Jury 
bMbec if was from ntcttuty ; for 
they could have no douai, though it shock- 
ed him very much.lhei the c;tse of slaves 
ha.l been thrown 
overboard."* Few persons at thepreseiil 
ioie could be conceived ao far to have 
baiidoned Ihe common feelings of numan- 
ly, to be so deeply biassed by prejudice. 
T so debased by )*varice, as to make such 
n observation. Yet this, only forty years 
g>o. tva^ the language of one of ibe great- 
el lawyers ot' ihe day, in a court of justice 
»d in a casp where UO-innocent human 
•eines were destroyed for the purpose ot 






n they could have supposed pos- 
ind while they throw around thote 
n I.Tbor, an enlivening gleam which 
lies their hopes, they prompt them 
aried and persevering activity. — ■ 
enemies are lively, and they ar< 
' far more powerful and more nu' 
than one who have ever been chal 
tended to the comhat. Those ivho unfold 



These inslances 'how that the 


ah 


those who toiled at firs! almoil 


w 


hope, have been crowned with sn 


ces 



ed the horrors of the Sla' 



ed t 









ly few 
those who endeavor to place 

nift of almost every individual 



and kingdom) 
! sentiment hVs prevailed, and that is 
il tvar is lawful and honorable. Thou 

ployment, their only road to honor an 
orunient. Wilh all the enerey and lal 
I (Tiat were displayed, and all the iiiSu 
livity ths " ^ ^ 



too, by ibe frequently Yepfsled and 
orpressions of Ibe people, it requ'- 
fewer than twenty year- 
were fully OKanized. l< 
criminality upon the SI, 
then beejpGctPd thai 



after its c/ueltiei 



ol> few 



;n1ancy. unt.ded ty any pori- 



able 10 I 






uale, should recoil, 
change ol opinic 



'ipecled HI so short a lime. Il was nol 
he anticipation of the Peace Society that 
heyrltoufd thus speedily produce a change 
nopinioiiBso 



II, l.y tbe Stan 
and by-clear a 
they have been 

humanity, jifsti ,^ , -, 
of the christian world, they hj.o ... .ol 
degree eicited their altenlion to a aubje 
of such importance; if Ibey hav« Ibroi 
before the world a body of evidence, ane 
collection of arguments, on the subject 
war entirely unprecedented— then, wh; 
eveJ objects mar retard their progress, we 
are bound 10 acknowledge that they have 
made no inconsiderable advance toward 
the accompl.ihoent of their purpose.— 
This through the blessing 













nal disputes. 


f unc 


sputed fac'i, 


fra^ib 


e argumenlj. 


slrip warot III oier- 


bya, 


appeal to the 


i r.hg 


out principles 



: of Ao 



upplied from that spring 



Fac-simile of a Portion of the First Page of the New Eng- 
land Weekly Review. 

From the collection q/ the Connecticut Historical Society of Hartjord. 



3IO AMERICAN LANDS &- LETTERS. 

couragements which pave the way to an ardent 
and life-long friendship. The Quaker farm-boy 
— earnest to multiply all helps for a better 
schooling — has also his shoe-making experience ; 
in which the measured beat upon the lap-stone 
is balanced and lightened by a beat of trochaic 
measures and song. There is apprenticeship, 
moreover, to the printing craft; but the ^^compos- 
ing-stick " in his hand always lags behind the 
composing-stick in his thought. His work is 
known and welcomed in all the local journals ; it 
has wandered even as far as Hartford, where that 
wit, George D. Prentice — in those days managing 
the Neiu England Revieio — has pounced upon 
the Quaker poet as a good successor to himself, 
when he files away to enter upon his Kentucky 
career. 

In 1830-31, therefore, Whittier is virtual 
editor of that Hartford weekly ; and I can recall 
distinctly how, in those years (when the present 
writer was a fledgling-pupil at a country school 
fifteen miles away from the tidy Connecticut capi- 
tal) there was a close fingering of the goods — 
journals, raisins, and candies — which an itinerant 



WHITTIER AS EDITOR. 



311 



huckster brought every Saturday afternoon into 
the school-yard — for a possible story or poem by 
'^ J. G. W. !'^ A year or two later we find Whit- 
tier returned to his old home, shouldering up the 
industrial exigencies of the farm — his father be- 
ing dead — but 
still illuminat- 
ing the news- 
paper columns 
with the bright 
outcome of his 
wakeful muse. 

He has also 
a quasi entry 
upon politics ; 
is twice a mem- 
ber of the Mas- 
sachusetts Leg- 
islature ; is stim- 
ulated to vigor- 
ous political plotting ; has large faith in his lobby- 
ing capacity ; is even talked of as possible member 
of Congress. He is for some time lie Avith that 
acute politician Caleb Gushing, then recently re- 




Caleb Gushing. 

Front a Photograph taken in 1870. 



312 AMERICAN LANDS &- LETTERS. 

turned from European voyaging, and who not 
mucli later gave to the Knickerbocker readers his 
Notes from the Netherlands ; but the lines of po- 
litical travel for these two Essex men soon diverged 
largely ; and for the Gushing of John Tyler's and 




Whittier's Home at Amesbury, Mass. 



Buchanan^'s day, it is certain that Whittier could 
have broken into no paeans of applause. 

After 1836 he betakes himself to a village 
home in Amesbury (the ancestral farm being 
sold), and there — not so far away as to forbid 
companionship with the hills and brooks which 




Whittier at the Age of Thirty-one. 

Froui a crayon drawing 0/ a dagturreotype taken in 1838. 



WHIT TIER'S HOME. 315 

had made rejoicings for his boyhood — he kept 
and guarded his kindly bachelor serenity in a 
home which was brightened for many and many a 
year by the feminine graces and the unconquer- 
able cheer and courage of his younger sister. 
There is all the while more or less of working con- 
nection with this or that local journal, which 
represented his ^^ Henry Clay^' and his "^Indus- 
triar^* procliyities, and which could show hospital- 
ity to the strong anti-slavery note of much of his 
better verses — by reason of their poetic graces. 
He even comes to the distinction of being mobbed 
in those turbulent times, when George Thompson, 
the English anti-slavery expositor, came over to 
instruct New Englanders in their social and moral 
duties. But Whittier was never a man to shrink 
from any hazards or any indignities to which he 
might be exposed by firm and full utterances of 
his humane and kindly instincts, and of his 
sympathy with captives everywhere. From noto- 
riety of a vulgar sort he always shrunk ; but from 
that which was due to annoyance, however 
ignoble, incurred for conscience sake, he never 
shrunk. 




1 

■^ 



ft'^"^-! 



WHITTIER, 317 

In the memorable days belonging to the 
period of the fugitive slave-law decision, and the 
trend of fiery Northerners over the borders of 
Kansas, he broke indeed into peals of Hebraic 
wrath, which sometimes outburned the rhetorical 
blaze of his poetic measiire of song. If he were 
to write again, under the lights which have 
opened upon him Beyond, I think he would 
modify, in some degree, the excoriating mention 
of Webster in his fiery poem of " Ichabod " — 

" Then, pay the reverence of old days 
To his dead fame ; 
Walk backward, with averted gaze, 
And hide the shame." 

Else, there would be a cold meeting for those two 
— twinned by traceable lines of Puritan blood, and 
twinned by the deep-set darkling eyes — in those 
courts of Futurity, where the poet believed all 
who had ever wrought well in any lines of life 
would surely meet. 

Critics — knowing in those small matters — say 
that his verse has technical flaws of rhyme and 
measure ; 'tis very likely, too, that his classical 
allusions come on the wing of Plutarch ; but his 



3i8 AMERICAN LANDS &- LETTERS. 

Nor-Easters are just as real, though they do not 
carry the pretty Greek clatter of 

"Eroclydon — the storm- wind." 

But we must leave this New England master 
of the deep-set eyes ; and in leaving I make a 
threefold summing up of the big virtues that be- 
longed to this man and to his work : First — his 
humanities ; always ready to lift that clear honest 
voice of his to the chorus where there was chant- 
ing in furtherance of humane enterprise, or in 
honor of humane workers — whether living or 
dead — and always generous to the full limit of 
his means ; always ready with a sharp note of 
distrust against organized schemes for the aggran- 
dizement of wealth — against wealth itself even, 
except it came only to flow out again in beneficent 
streams of well-doing, and kindly helpfulness. 
Again, there belonged to this singer, broad and 
earnest religious thought ; clear, simple, and suffi- 
cient, with no crevices where the acrid juices of 
sectarianism could put in their work. The great 
vital truths are set firmly in his jewelled verse, 
while the lesser ones, about which doctors and 




John G. Whittier. 



WHITTIER 321 

presbyters everlastingly wrangie, drift down the 
wind — even as chaff scuds away where grain is 
winnowed. 

Yet another virtue in our poet is his unblinking 
New Englandism. Burns was never more undis- 
guisedly Scottish;, than this man was equipped 



-*- 'v<«. »'-•». 1 




A Quiet Day on the Merrimac. 

with all the sights and sounds, and loves and 

hopes, which clustered ^^ thither and yon" along 

the pretty valley of the Merrimac. Snows have 

their white memorial in little heaps filtered 

through crevices by door or window ; the horns of 

the baited cattle clash against the stanchions in 

the barn ; and with every spring-tide the arbutus 
21 



322 AMERICAN LANDS &- LETTERS. 

and the hepatica blush through the mat of last 
yearns leaves. 

"Inland, as far as the eye can go, 
The hills curve round like a bended bow ; 
A silver arrow from out them sprung, 
I see the shine of the Quasycung ; 
And round and round, over valley and hill, 
Old roads winding, as old roads will, 
Here to a ferry, and there to a mill ; 
And glimpses of chimneys and gabled eaves, 
Through green elm arches and maple leaves — 
Old homesteads sacred to all that can 
Gladden or sadden the heart of man." 

Whittier wrote very much ; but there are 
touches of his that will survive as long as New 
England blood and pride survive. 

A Half-hioivn Author, 

I call this writer, of whom we are now to speak 
— and who also had the blood of middle New Eng- 
land brimming in him — half-known, because his 
death came about when his work was half done,* 
and because the book by which he is best known, 

* Sylvester Judd, b. 1813; d. 1853. Margaret, A Tale of 
the Real and the Ideal, 1845 ; Life and Character of Syl- 
vester Judd^ by Miss Arethusa Hall, Boston, 1854, 



SYLVESTER JUDD 325 

does by reason of its redundancies and lack of 
bookmaking craft, only lialf reveal the excel- 
lencies of the man. 

Though he was younger by a half dozen years 
than Whittier, yet he had finished all his preach- 
ments in his little church at Augusta, Me., and 
had rounded out his tale of books long before 
the Amesbury poet had wrapped his memory in 
the glittering covers of SnoiD Bound. 

Sylvester Judd was bred in the extreme sancti- 
ties and rigidities of Calvinism at Westhampton 
— almost within sight of that church of a neighbor 
town from which Jonathan Edwards had been 
dislodged — had been educated at Yale (183G), 
where his diary shows uneasy Edwardsian self-ex- 
aminations — had gone through the whole gamut 
of religious doubts and ecstasies — had studied 
'* Divinity" at Harvard, and in the easy fit of a 
spick and span Unitarian jacket of belief, and 
full of an exuberant, a self-denying, and a hope- 
ful piety, he is planted (1840) over a flock in 
Maine. 

He was of delicate make, with delicate tastes, 
having high reputation for scholarship ; giving 



326 AMERICAN LANDS &- LETTERS. 

his conscience large range, and his heart, too (very 
likely the criticasters would, and did, sneer at him 
as one wearing his heart upon his sleeve) ; frail, as 

I said, physi- 
cally ; but men- 
tally and mor- 
ally large; with 
sensibilities all 
open, like an 
^olian harp to 
the wind ; but 
true to those 
eternal verities 
by which great 
currents of 
Sylvester Judd. thought hold 

Reproduced front an Old Print. t h P 1 T POTir^P^ 

In the pulpit not trusting himself without notes ; 
but sometimes breaking away in the heat of his exal- 
tation into a warmth which was like the fires in the 
bush Moses saw. Oftener, however, over-humble — 
stealing his way quietly to the desk as if he wished 
none to see him ; opening his talk, as if he wished 
none to hear him. Gentle, scholarly, shrinking — as 




MARGARET. 327 

unlike as possible to those Boanerges who thunder 
and wait for the echoes. Reading, as if what he 
read were the thing alone deserving of attention ; 
and so putting a magnetic current into the read- 
ing that electrified and possessed one with a sense 
of a far-away Power-House, from which life-giv- 
ing currents flowed. 

This was the man who wrote Margaret, about 
which book I wish to say one word before closing 
this chapter of talk. Darley, the artist, did some 
outline illustrations for the tale of Margaret, 
which are admirable, and known to many not 
familiar with the story. 

The book has its circumlocutions. Words are 
oft-times piled in heaps ; some we do not know — 
perhaps a scholarly theft from Chaucer, or from 
Lydgate ; perhaps a bit of smart provincialism — 
unfamiliar but racy — smacking of the real — a 
quaver of stirring life in them all. So full of 
wordy instincts that he tries — with too manifest 
a quest — to catch all the sounds of all the birds, 
and of all his four-footed friends of the woods, in 
his Onamatopoetic nets : too much of this, perhaps ; 
and throughout, too much of the clangor of an 



328 AMERICAN LANDS &^ LETTERS. 

ambitious vocabulary. There are curious down- 
East characters — driving oxen with quaint objur- 
gatory phrase, or with knotted goad — putting in 
their ''gees" and ''haws" with unctuous nasality; 




Reduced Fac-simile of a Drawing by Darley in Sylvester Judd's 

" Margaret." 



trousers and boots, and all nether accoutrements, 
scenting through and through of the barn-yard. 
Again, there is a curious old "Master," of teach- 
ing arts — perhaps least real of all — a needed lay- 
figure on which the author hangs the tags of ex- 
ploited faiths and exploded doctrines, which he 



MARGARET. 329 

wants to present in parenthesis ; yet the figure 
fills quaintly and ingeniously certain gaps which 
the motherhood and sisterhood of the narrative 
could not bridge across. 

I said there were redundancies ; perhaps one 
may count such the minute and faithful ^^ re- 
peats " of vulgar domestic broils which have sway 
in so many isolated households. These come " to 
the fore " in his many unshrinking ganglions of 
descriptive talk, with all the imbruted obstinacies 
and the yieldings — that are not yieldings — keeping 
up their welter, while bursts of fatherly and filial 
feeling here and there break through in regaling 
rifts of sunshine. 

But more regaling than all is the rarely absent 
figure of Margaret, penetrated with an illumi- 
nating, inborn Christ-love, that opens march for 
her, and sets her tripping — through whatever 
clouds — to the glad light, which this man of 
conscience keeps always before him. 

That pleasing presence, with its brightness and 
graces and pretty allurements, is throughout — as 
he meant it should be — a redeeming feature. The 
charm opens in the child's ingenuousness; it keeps 



330 AMERICAN LANDS &- LETTERS. 

its hold through dawning youthhood ; it honors 
and dignifies the woman ; and from the simple 
lustre of the central figure the tag-rags of special 
theologic doctrine drift away, as she goes on her 
airy-fairy march in the cleanness of the Christ- 
love — which is her sufficient adornment. 

It was a large attempt this writer made — to show 
through all the interstices of family bickerings 
and family loves and jealousies, the clear shining 
of an unconscious innocency ; and though he may 
have failed of full accomplishment, he has done so 
much and so well — with such piquant touches 
of real life — such dainty reproduction of Nature's 
own lavish florescence and her brooding shadows 
of the pine woods — that his name will long be 
cherished in the lettered annals of New England. 



CHAPTER VI. 

OUR last grouping of the characters in this 
lettered story brought into presence — first, 
that keen, shrewd man of the woods and of books, 
who, with a joining of Scotch, Norman, and Puri- 
tan blood in his veins, made up a rare composite 
New Englander ; loving the sleepy meadows of the 
slow Assabet, and loving the weird stretch of those 
ribs of sand which brace Cape Cod against the 
seas ; loving books, too, and unfettered ranges of 
thought ; and by reason of his early death gath- 
ered (before his proper date) into the same group 
with those Concord men who knew him in their 
homes and saw him die. 

Then came into view that gracious poet and 
favored son of fortune, who began an active career 
with teaching Italian idioms and paradigms to 
Bowdoin students, and endowed it with such 

Psalms of Life as all the world listened to, and 

331 



332 AMERICAN LANDS &- LETTERS. 

kept in their hearts. After this, came from the 
same pen scholarly echoes, in unexceptionable 
and daintiest English, of the marvellous and 
untranslatable Inferno of Dante. 

Next we had glimpse of that poet-philanthro- 
pist and humanitarian who punctuated his kindly 
speech with Quaker Thee's and Tliou's, and his 
poems all, with delightful rhythmic graces ; never 
a student in great schools — save that of nature ; 
and with a fund of ardent Americanism in him 
that was never diluted by European travel. That 
little way-side Romaunt of Maud Muller would 
keep him always in mind if he had never written 
verse with far riper beauties. 

Last came that quiet, blue-eyed, almost boyish, 
preacher, who put sermons into his story of Mar- 
garet which kindle the attention of listeners yet. 

Poet and Professor. 

There lies before me as I write, a little volume 
of a hundred and sixty-two pages, bound in green 
muslin, with stamped figures of a flamboyant vine 
and flowers upon it — the binding sadly broken, 
and pages thumb-worn — with a paper label on the 



DOCTOR HOLMES. 333 

back bearing the legend ^'^ Holmes's Poems."* 
It was the first edition and bears the date of 1836; 

^A^^A^- Z^Af^et^,^ Z^^^^^:^ 
o4<t 7^ trt^ y4^vt/c4r^ ^^A^ 

Fac-simile of Dr. Holmes's Handwriting. 

(The blurred effect is due to the soft texture of the pa^er.) 

while upon the tattered fly-leaf just within the 
covers is the copy of a verse in the handwriting 

* Oliver Wendell Holmes, b. 1309 ; d. 1894. Foems (first 
issue), 1836, Otis, Broaders & Co., Boston. Astraa *. B. K. 
poem, 1850, TJie Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table^ 1858; 
The Professor at the Breakfast- Table, 1860; Elsie Ven7ier, 
1861 ; The Guardian Angel, 1867 ; The Poet at the Break- 
fast-Table, 1872; R, W. Emerson, 1885; Over the Tea- 
cups^ 1891. 



334 AMERICAN LANDS &- LETTERS. 

of the master, from one of his most cherished 
poems : 

" And if I should live to be 
The last leaf upon the tree 

In the spring, 
Let them smile as I do now 
At the old forsaken bough 
Where I cling." 
1831 Oliver Wendell Holmes. 1890. 

For fifty- three years that thumb-worn volume 
had been upon my shelves, and in sending it 
(1890) to the author for consecration at his hands, 
I ventured to tell him (with the same hardihood 
with which others are now told) that the book 
had been bought in early college days (1837), and 
had been read over and over with great glee and 
liking — that twenty-three years later it had been 
read to children at Edge wood, who had shown a 
kindred glee and liking — and that again, thirty 
years later, the same favorite work had been read 
to grandchildren of the house, who had listened 
with the same old love and relish. 

Whereupon the genial master of verse returned 
the book, with the authentication of his kindly 
hand upon it, and one of the charming notelets 



ANCESTRY OF HOLMES. 



335 



which slipped so easily from his pen. I venture 
to excerpt a line or two — 

" . . Laudare a laudato is always pleasing, and this 

request of yours is the most delicate piece of flattery — if 
I may use the word in its innocent sense — that I have re- 
ceived for a long while." 




Tiie " Gambrel-roofed House " in Cambridge in which Dr. 
Hohiies was Born. 



Our good friend^ Dr. Holmes (and all the read- 
ing world has a right to speak of him thus), was 
the son of an old style Connecticut clergyman, 
who had been bred among the rough pastures of 
Windham County, and had been educated at Yale, 



336 AMERICAN LANDS &- LETTERS. 

but was afterward translated to Canibridge, where 
he had a church, and a gambrel-roofed house— now 
gone — but perpetuated by such particular and ten- 
der mention on the part of the distinguished son, 
who was born under its shelter, that we have planted 
a good picture of it on these pages. This son 
when he printed his first book of poems was 
twenty-seven ; he had graduated at Harvard with 
excellent scholarly stand in the class of ''29 — the 
same year on which that sturdy Federalist,* Josiah 
Quincy, succeeded to President Kirkland, and 
gave a sagacious government to the college — as he 
had already given good municipal order, and a 
good Market-house to Boston. This many-sided 
President was also author of a history of the Col- 
lege ; and we excerpt from it a grand exhibit of the 

* He strongly opposed the war with England (1812) and 
the purchase of Louisiana — declaring that his fellow Con- 
gressmen had " no authority to throw the rights and liberties 
and property of this people into hotch-pot with the wild men 
on the Missouri, or with the mixed, though more respectable, 
race of Anglo-Hispano-Gallo-Americans who bask on the 
sands in the mouth of the Mississippi." This sounds very 
much like recent (1899) utterances from the mouths of 
Massachusetts anti-Imperialists. 







?: '*. 



HOLMES IN EUROPE. 339 

procession which belonged to festal Commence- 
ment days in those old times — when our pleasant 
Dr. Holmes was a young marcher there ; and a 
pensman as well — illustrating the pages of the 
students' Collegian with such rollicking fun as 
you will find in the '^Spectre Pig" or in ''the 
Tailor" — who prettily buttoned his jacket ''with 
the stars/' 

For a year or two after graduation Dr. Holmes 
had wavered between law and medicine, and 
deciding for the latter, had gone via New York 
(where he saw Fanny Kemble — ^' a very fine affair, 
I assure you " *) to study in Paris ; and there are 
vivid little pictures in his letters — of Dupuytren, 
Velpeau, and Ricord, who were then prominent at 
the Hotel Dieu and La Charite ; and still other 
vivid outlines of what was seen on a quick run 
through Holland and the Scottish country. 

But that Connecticut-born minister, who had 
married for his first wife a daughter of the re- 
doubtable President Stiles (of Yale), and for his 
second wife that excellent lady of the Wendell 
family, who gave to the poet his name and his 

* Letter of March 30, 1833; Morse's Life^ vol. i., p 83. 



340 AMERICAN LANDS &- LETTERS. 

large mother-wit, was not greatly endowed with 
worldly goods ; and there were serious question- 
ings if the enthusiastic student could extend his 
voyaging into Southern Europe — as he greatly 
desired ; at last, however, self-denials at home 
made the journey possible for the eager young 
New Englander — earnest to do what '' the other 
fellows did ; " and a quick succeeding trip to Italy 
made markings upon his mental camera which 
never left the young man's mind. *' They talk 
about Henry VII. Chapel, of Westminster," he 
says in a letter of 1835 ; ^^ 't would make a very 
pretty pigeon-house for Milan Cathedral." Such 
comparisons, which carry a tale in them, run 
through all those early letters. 

In the spring of 1838 he is at home — a doctor 
— with '* his sign " out ; quick, keen, observant ; 
perhaps too boy-like in aspect to impress elderly 
people, and loving a ^Miorse and chaise" then — 
and always — better than a sick-room. In 1838 he 
was made Professor at Dartmouth ; had gained 
praise for medical essays ; and at that time or 
thereabout had written upon the contagious char- 
acter of puerperal fever, in a way that gave him 



PROFESSOR HOLMES. 



341 



permanent and distinguished place among the 
doctors who put brains into their work. In 1840 
he married ; and some six or seven years later 
came to his appointment as Professor of Anatomy 
in Harvard University, which he held continu- 
ously for thirty-five years. 




The Old Harvard Medical School, Boston. 

It was a pit, in which he used to lecture at the 
old medical school in North Grove Street, and 
where he came to his tasks — like a veteran, so far 
as anatomical knowledge and precision of state- 
ment went ; but like a boy, so far as play of witty 
allusion and comparison went ; never did a man 



342 AMERICAN LANDS ^ LETTERS. 

of science so halve his honors between what was 
due to knowledge and what was due to coruscating 
wit. A sight of him with his forceps over a ca- 
daver made one forget his poems; and a reading 
of his poems, such as the Nautilus^ or the Last 
Leaf, made one straightway forget — as they do 
now — all dead things. 

As Autocrat 

If that '^ seventy-year clock " set a going by the 
''Angel of Life " — about which our Doctor-Poet 
speaks with engaging piquancy in the eighth 
chapter of his first prose book — had been silenced 
at forty-five, the world in general would have 
known little of the reach and buoyancy of his 
mind ; and the biographers might have dismissed 
him with mention like this : ^' Died in 1858, Dr. 
Holmes, a physician of fair practice, who lectured 
on anatomy and wrote clever poems. '^ 

In the winter of 1831-32 there had appeared 
in that old Neio England Magazine — in which, 
as we have seen, Willis, Whittier, and others 
had their occasional '' innings " — a paper from 
Dr. Holmes, under title of '' Autocrat of the 



THE AUTOCRAT. 343 

Breakfast-Table ; ^^ but this was unripe fruit ; and 
it was not until the establishment of the Atlantic, 
a quarter of a century later, that the same author 
— then at the mellow age of forty-eight — did, 
under the kindly urgence of Editor Lowell, under- 
take that new series of the ^' Autocrat " which 
made his fame and gave delight to thousands. 

Yet there is scarce a page in the book as it fi- 
nally appeared but would have somewhere started 
the sour disapproval of the conventional teachers 
of rhetoric and literature ; indeed it would be hard 
to name any book which shows the rifts of new 
lightning in it that would satisfy the professors 
of ''good writing." There is no method in the 
Autocrat ; hardly has he nosed his way into an 
easily apprehended consecutive line of talk, than 
he breaks away — like a shrewd old hound who is 
tired of the yelping " pack " — upon some new 
keen scent of his own. The foxy savors of a 
harsh Calvinism — which he had known in young 
days — whenever they drifted athwart his memory, 
always put him into such lively objurgations as 
would have brought a smart raj) on the knuckles 
from his Orthodox father. 



344 AMERICAN LANDS <^ LETTERS. 

A great many such raps came to him from other 
quarters, which he took smilingly ; but never so 




Holmes when a Young Man. 

FroTn a photograph by Hatues. 



seriously as to forbid his giving a new thwack 
when occasion came. It was objected by many 



RELIGION OF HOLMES. 345 

that the Doctor never gave a full credo of his own, 
while picking flaws in so many.* The simple 
opening of the Pater Noster — *^Oar Father^' — 
had very large religious significance for him ; but 
it is doubtful if the worshipful utterance of this 
Shibboleth of Trust ever carried with it that 
suffusion of awe and mystery which wrapped 
around the minds of Emersonians. He was not 
an inapt church-goer ; rather loved a resting of 
his head against the bobbins of a high, old-fash- 
ioned pew, whence he might follow the discourse, 
as a sharp kingbird — to make use of his own 
delightful simile — tracks the flight of a stately and 
ponderous crow ; dipping at him when angles of 
flight served — plucking now and then a feather 
— and if arriving at the same goal, marking his 
skyey way with a great many interjected bits of 
black plumage. 

Dr. Holmes had not the stuff in him to make 
an anchorite of, or yet a saintly monk. He was 
too vif and incompressible ; far apter to take in 

* Perhaps the nearest approach may be found in a letter 
to Mrs. Stowe (without date) in the second volume of 
Morse's Biography^ pp. 248-49. 



346 AMERICAN LANDS <S^ LETTERS. 

evidence that came by the way of the probe and 
the forceps, than that other sort that comes by 
sonl - right, or birth - right, or Wordsworthian 
memories — 

" Trailing clouds of glory ! " 

But, if whimsically critical, and odd- whiles brand- 
ishing his scalpel in threatening gladiatorial style, 
^tis certain that in all essentials he was at one with 
broad-minded Christian teachers everywhere ; nor 
do I find it easy to forecast any worthy vision of a 
'^ Celestial country ^^ where the alert little Doctor 
and his good Calvinistic father should not be 
joined again — hand and heart. 

The Autocrat Avas followed in succeeding years 
— by the Professor, and again the Poet — at the 
well-used Breakfast-Table. But the delightful in- 
consequence of the Autocrat's talk did not admit 
of duplication. There are gems scattered up and 
down throughout the series ; all will be cherished 
while inspiriting books are thought worth read- 
ing ; but this will not forbid our saying that the 
first are best. 

There are woods which in the burning give out 
balsamic scents — regaling, stimulative ; and there 




o 

CO 



3 

o 



c 
o 
o 

QQ 



O 

Q 

c 



THE AUTOCRAT. 349 

are books which, in the reading, give out the aro- 
mas of the fine spirit which went to the kindling 
of the text — the spirit that flows out and in — 
transfusing the type — illuminating the crevices 
— past all offices of the '^ black and white '' illus- 
trators. And it is this buoyant, rollicking, witty 
Ariel of a spirit, that we recognize and love, all up 
and down the pages of the Autocrat. 

We cannot lay our finger on the special phrase 
which informs us — beyond all informing proc- 
esses of other masters ; we cannot dissect and 
lay bare the nerve-centres, which set the mass 
a-throb ; but none the less we know they are 
there. 

If I were challenged to name the arch quality 
in this brilliant entertainer, I should be tempted 
to put his New England gumption (as the natives 
call it) at the very top. He can indeed be elo- 
quent — this witty Doctor — and bring all the 
rhythmic ^^ beats and pauses " of the schools into 
play ; he can do fine writing — with the finest ; 
but he ventures on such indulgence, as if half- 
ashamed, and straightway lays some stroke of 
high, mastering common-sense athwart the page 



3SO AMERICAN LANDS &- LETTERS. 

which quite belittles, and subordinates all the 
school-craft and pen-craft. 

Still later came Biographies from the hand of 
this subtle observer, well-gauged and told — con- 
ventionally ; but he was largest when he broke 
literary rules — not when he followed them. 
Motley, of whose life he made a short story, he 
knew well ; and so could lay his own heart to his, 
and weigh the hazards and triumphs of his life 
with a quickening zest that made one partner in 
the joys and honors ; but with Emerson (as I 
have already said*) it was not the same. The 
facets of these two minds caught the sun at dif- 
ferent angles ; nor was there ever that easy, long- 
continued, confidential interchange of thoughts 
and hopes (as in the case of Motley) which 
paved the way for a beguiling flow of biographic 
story. All the crammings and the ^^ readings 
up " in the world will not supply the place of 
this. 

From all this, however (though not without its 
charm), and from the later dishing of the delicate 
Tea-cups, we hie away to that first budget of the 

* Chapter IV., present volume. 



THE AUTOCRAT, 353 

Autocrat's talk, with glee and an appetite that 
does not pall. There, the Doctor is always delight- 
fully himself ; conscientious, watchful, chiruppy ; 
with an opinion always ready, jpro or con; but 
not ready or apt to magnify or exalt that opinion 
by resolutions, or the clap-trap of a big meeting 
and of bass drums ; keen at a wallop of the pillule 
methods of the homceopaths ; and readier yet (if he 
had encountered them) at a crack of his resound- 
ing lash around the flanks and ears of — so-called 
— Christian Scientists ; tender, too, odd-whiles — 
as where he takes the hand of the pretty School- 
Mistress in his own, and sets off with her down 
the ^^long path/' 

'Tis not yet, I think, fully appreciated ; but 
this book of the Autocrat, it seems to me, will go 
with Montaigne, with the essays of Goldsmith, 
with Lamb's Elia, upon one of the low shelves 
where 'twill always be within reach, and always 
help to give joy in the reading ; and if the prose 
passages do not suffice, there remains that poem 
of the Nautilus (to which my book opens of it- 
self) ; how beautiful, and how charmingly fresh 

it is! 

23 



354 AMERICAN LANDS &- LETTERS. 

" Thanks for the heavenly message brought by thee, 

Child of the wandering sea, 

Cast from her lap forlorn ! 
From thy dead lips a clearer note is born 
Than ever Triton blew from wreathed horn ! 

"While on my ear it rings, 
Through the deep caves of thought I hear a voice that sings : 

*' Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul, 

As the swift seasons roll ! 

Leave thy low- vaulted past ! 
Let each new temple, nobler than the last. 
Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast, 

Till thou at length art free, 
Leaving thine outgrown shell by life's unresting sea ! " 

Some Other Doctors, 
Among those good Christian teachers — who 
though no more believers than the poet in the literal 
'^ lake of fire and brimstone," had crepitations of 
doubt about the influences of the anti-calvinistic 
onslaughts of the Professor^ as possibly supplanting 
serene inheritance of belief with sceptical unrest 
— was that kindly President of Yale* who in 1871 
succeeded to the place of President Woolsey.f 

* Noah Porter, b. 1 8 1 1 ; d. 1892. The Human Intellect, 1868 ; 
Boohs and Readings, 1870 ; Elements of 3fo7'al ScieJice, 1885. 

t Theodore Dwight Woolsey, b. 1801 ; d. 1889. Alcestis, 
1834; Political Science^ 1871. 



PRESIDENT WOOLSEY. 



355 



This latter, a nephew of the elder President 
D wight, was a keen, sympathetic scholar ; not a 
mere verbalist, b n t 
loving Greek because 
Electra, and the woes 
of Alcestis, and a thou- 
sand charms lived in 
its music ; withal, car- 
rying a stern Hebraic 
zeal into defence of 
old - fashion ed family 
integrities and puri- 
ties — as opposed to the 
gangrene of easy di- 
vorce ; joining, too, a 
shrewd Saxon sense to his large knowledge of inter- 
national law in questions of state-craft. All this 
belonged to him ; and so did captivating, scholarly 
courtesies ; yet the writer can well remember how 
a bad accent or a blundering murder of the sym- 
phonies that grew out of a good Greek scansion 
of Euripides would overset his nerves, and almost 
(but never quite) goad him to anger. 

President Porter was cooler and perhaps calmer ; 




Theodore D, Woolsey. 

From a photograph taken itt j8jO- 



356 AMERICAN LANDS &> LETTERS. 



more often lieated by metapliysic burnings than 
by any widowed woes of an Alcestis ; yet a most 

lovable, kind- 
hearted man — 
incapable of an 
untruth, wheth- 
er he talked of 
good reading or 
f causalities ; 
stanchly ortho- 
dox, and so a 
little inquisitive 
about the paces 
of those who 
travelled . (theo- 
logically) in a broad road ; but doing all his bat- 
tles with a smile of kindliness, and smiting the 
Eeids or Stewarts — if need were — with blows 
muffled in charities. Not over-apt in delicate 
phrases — stronger in scholastics than in pretti- 
nesses, and reckoning the graces of an active con- 
science and of accuracy beyond all the graces of 
words. 

We cannot pass the name of that good, patient. 




Noah Porter. 

Front a J>hoto^yaph taken about i8j2. 



FREEMAN CLARKE. 



357 



learned Dr. Freeman Clarke,* who had the large 
heart and the wise purpose to combine in his 




James Freeman Clarke. 

From a photo^rajih taken in 18S3. 

'' Church of the Disciples " (1840) a good many of 
the best things in the service of a half dozen sects 
of believers. Whatever we may think of his 

* James Freeman Clarke, b, 1810; d. 1888. Doctrine of 
Forgiveness of Sin^ 1852 ; Ten Great Religions^ 1871-83. 



358 AMERICAN LANDS 6- LETTERS. 

Ten Great Religions (and we know of no book 
that would fill its place), we must thank him for 
the large charity which, by his exposition of what 
has been reckoned the idolatrous service of myri- 
ads of heathen, has brought them — or was eager 
to bring them — into kindly relations with the in- 
finite Power symbolized by their idols. He was 
an earnest advocate of all worthy freedom, and of 
human brotherhood ; I wish as much could be 
said of all accredited preachers. 

Contemporary with these men I have named, 
were those brothers Reed of Pennsylvania — grand- 
sons of General Joseph Eeed * of Eevolutionary an- 
nals — one of whom was honorably known in diplo- 
matic position ; the other by his loving and critical 
charge of the earliest American edition of Words- 
worth ; both held professorships in the University 
of Pennsylvania, and both kept bravely alive the 
best traditions of Philadelphia culture. 

* President of second provincial congress, Adjutant Gen- 
eral under Washington, and subject of certain ill-founded 
allegations (in earlier editions of Bancroft's History), which 
were successfully antagonized by "William B. Reed, who 
was Minister to China (1857) and negotiated the treaty of 
1858. 



A JOURNALIST. 



359 



Horace Greeley. 

If Professor Henry Reed (unfortunately lost in 
the Arctic catastrophe of 185-i) be a good type 
of the culture which comes of collegiate discipline 




House at Amherst, N. H., in which Greeley was Born. 

and happy social adjuncts, Horace Greeley * may 
be counted an excellent one of that hardy and 
resolute training which belongs to what we call a 
*^ self-made '' man. That flax-haired, smooth-faced 

* Horace Greeley, b. 1811; d. 1872. American Conflict^ 
1864-66; Recollections of a Busy Life., 1868. 



360 AMERICAN LANDS ^ LETTERS. 

boy, who founded the bright little Neio Yorker 
in 1834, and decoyed bright workers into his trail, 
and who ultimately founded the Neto York 
Tribune with a great galaxy of literary retainers 
— that boy, I say, who was sprung from Scotch- 
Irish forbears, and who knew all the good huckle- 
berry patches and the haunts of partridges around 
the high-lands of his New Hampshire home, had 
a grievously hard time in his youth. Even dis- 
trict-school chances were narrow ; home-funds 
were narrower. He chopped, he burned coal, he 
rode horse to plough ; he battled with all storms, 
and carried that brave, smooth front of his at the 
head of the column, when the New Hampshire 
farming broke down and the sheriff had come, 
and the family was afoot for a new home by Lake 
Champlain. There, the status of the son was no 
better ; nor better in further and more westerly 
wanderings. 

There was nothing but work for him ; crudest 
work at first ; then, work at the trade of printer, 
which he had learned ; multiplied foot-wanderings 
followed — which bring him at last (1831) to New 
York — with a round face, quick courage, com- 




Horace Greeley. 



Frofn a daguerreotype in the collection of Mr. Peter Gilsey, 



THE NEW YORKER, 363 

plexion like a girFs, and five dollars in his pocket. 
After sundry experiences, good and bad, he had 
the pluck and the pennies to set up (1834) the 
New Yorker^ a weekly journal — largely literary, 
but not afraid to declare its political and economic 
leanings. 

Those who twirl over the early numbers of the 
New Yorker will find a strong — perhaps, over- 
ambitious, literary flavor, with pretty flashes of 
verse — maybe, from some such poetesses as Mrs. 
Whitman, and Mrs. Osgood, or other charmers. 
Park Benjamin,* too, puts in an appearance — 
sometimes as associate editor — showing somewhat 
of the impetuosity, vigor, and virulence which in 
those days commanded a listening. 

This last-named writer was born of American 
parents in Demerara ; had come hither early in 
life ; had suffered cruel surgical treatment, which 
with natural disabilities left him, in manhood, 
stalwart in arms, chest, and head, but incurably 
crippled as to his nether limbs. Possibly he was 
unhinged by this ill make-up ; certain it is, that 
with a capacity for the weaving of words into very 

* Park Benjamin, b. 1809 ; d. 1864. 



364 AMERICAN LANDS &* LETTERS. 

engaging and resonant verse, lie united great apti- 
tude for wordy quarrels and for vitriolic satire. 
He was a man of strong brain, possessed of tropi- 
cal passionateness of utterance ; but never accom 




Greeley at his Desk in the Tribune Office. 

plishing what his keen, active mind promised, 
and friends hoped for. 

Greeley's affiliation with Benjamin was not, 
however, for very long ; but he did draw into the 
journalistic ranks, later, such faithful workers as 



SELF-MADE MAN 365 

Raymond, Margaret Fuller, Charles Dana, Ripley, 
Curtis, and many another who has contributed — 
each in his or her way — to make of the old Tribune 
an efficient nurse of early American letters. 

With all his aptitude for sharp political dis- 
cussion, and a capacity, if need were, for noisy 
storms of temper and floods of Billingsgate, he 
had yet a nice sense of poetic beauties ; loving 
them in his youth ; loving them later ; and always 
keenly sensitive to the dash and fervor of a good 
poem, or to a thrilling burst of music. Like most 
self-made men he was a little suspicious and jeal- 
ous of the accomplishments that come of colle- 
giate study or any organized costly paraphernalia ; 
counting Latinity and Greek — with scholarly mas- 
tership of even the modern languages — as so much 
of millinery trapping, serving only as a pretty dis- 
guise for the essential under-truths, always ever 
so much better in their homely Saxon nakedness. 
He loved to extol the successes of those who had 
won place, without the drill of the cloisters, and 
without that wearing down and polish of rough 
mental edges and of egotism, which are apt to 
belong to those never whirled about in the hopper 



366 AMERICAN LANDS dr' LETTERS. 

of a college, and never submitted to sturdy tussle 
with fellows as big as tliey, on Division Room 
benches. 

He believed, though, in handicraft ; and would 
have thrown his old white hat into the air could 
he have known of the establishment and popular- 
ity of our *^ Industrial Schools/^ An intelligent, 
helpful, and tender sympathy always bound him 
to those who worked and to those who were poor. 
His daughter, Mrs. Clendenin, with filial gracious- 
ness, gives picture of him — on a stormy night of 
winter — bringing ^^ little homeless, ragged girls to 
shelter, and carrying their burdens for them.''^ * 

The Chappaqua Farm. 

He never overcame either, his old love for 
farming, and for its processes and products. 
Through all the intense belligerencies of his later 
political life he held and rejoiced in his little 
farm, with its modest house and bouncing barn 
upon the hill-slopes of Chappaqua. It was within 
three (or at most four) years before the end of his 
career that I passed a day with him there ; drawn 

* Ladies' Home Journal^ February, 1892. 




u t*: 



CQ 



o 



^ 



GREELEY AS WOODSMAN. 369 

thither by quick interest in his draining schemes, 
and farm experimentation. He gave most ready 
welcome to curiosity of that sort, and doffed all 
political professions and pretensions when the 
perfume of the Chappaqua woods beguiled him. 
He was in his best strength in those days ; his 
complexion still like a girFs ; his courtesies blunt, 
but not without a disguised heartiness ; his ad- 
miration for his newly equipped barn was boister- 
ous ; his enthusiasm over a good ^^ run " from his 
drainage tile, exuberant ; his welcome of the sun- 
shine, and of the notes of a bob-o'-link lilting over 
an alder-bush in the meadow was jubilant. ^Twas 
a simple dinner we had at the homestead ; his 
courtesies there all aimed to beat down memories 
of idle and non-essential conventionalities. This 
ceremony over, he advised me that after dinner he 
was used to take an hour or more of exercise with 
his axe, in the woods ; ^' perhaps, as farmer [with a 
little mischief in his tone], I would join him;" 
and he pointed to a second axe which was at my 
service. 
I am not sure, but have a grave suspicion that 

there was a large streak of humor in his proposal, 
24 



370 AMERICAN LANDS &^ LE TIERS. 

and that he greatly misdoubted the practical 
handicraft of his guest. It chanced^ however, that 
an axe was a favorite tool with me ; and I think I 
never enjoyed a triumph more than that over my 
host, when we had come to the wood — not only 
on score of time, but in showing by my scarf, that 
even distribution of right and left-handed strokes 
— without which no workman-like stump can be 
assured. His pleasant face beamed with generous 
acknowledgment ; he even doffed his white hat in 
recognition of work done i-n good wood-chopper 
style ; while a certain respect for his city guest was 
at last apparent. This little incident is detailed 
only to make clear the engaging simplicities be- 
longing to the character of the great journalist. 

Three years thereafter (the visit taking place in 
1868) Mr. Greeley Avas nominated for the Presi- 
dency by those ^*^ liberal Republicans" who were 
disaffected with General Grant ; and the Demo- 
cratic party — by a sudden volte-face — endorsed 
the candidacy. This involved a disruption of old 
party alliances, and such a campaign of abusive 
and malignant personalities as overset all the 
tranquillities and patient endurance of the author 




Greeley in the Woods of Chappaqua. 

From a photograph taken tn j86g, at the instance o; the author , and no7o in his J>ossesston 



EDGAR ALLEN POE. 373 

of the American Conflict. All the more was this 
turbid whirl of the political caldron disturbing 
and maddening, when the tide (which seemed at 
first setting Ms way) changed, and left him 
stranded with a hopeless minority of votes. He 
had worn himself down with eager, intense speech- 
making ; he had fretted under unwelcome fellow- 
ships ; he had wilted under appalling affliction in 
his own household ; at last his brain was shaken. 
There was indeed one little brave, beautiful 
struggle to hold fast the shifting helm of the old 
Tribune ship ; but it was vain ; and in 1872 — 
only four years after the pleasant encounter in 
the shady woods of Chappaqua — the beaming 
face, all drawn by mental inquietudes and the 
shivers of delirious frenzy, was hidden away in 
some Maison de Sante of the "Westchester Hills, 
never to mend until death came with its healing 
calm, and gave to his countenance the old serenities. 

Bred in the Purple, 

So much like a Romance is the life and death 
of the next writer — and the last I bring to your 
present notice — that I am tempted to begin, as old 



374 AMERICAN LANDS &> LETTERS. 

stories begin: — ''^ Once upon a time," nearly a 
cenfcury ago, a gay young fellow, of good presence, 
hailing from Baltimore, who had run away from 
home, and had married a young actress of bewitch- 
ing face and figure (albeit she was a widow), and 
was carrying out some theatre engagement with 
her in the Puritan city of Boston, gave word at the 
ticket office (January, 1809) that there would be 
an interruption in the performances ; and pres- 
ently thereafter, a baby-boy was born to the twain, 
who was called Edgar.* 

The father's name was David, aged thirty ; not 
a very good actor, but a zealous protector of his 
wife's claims, and threatening on one occasion to 
give a caning to Buckingham (of that Netu Eng- 
land Magazine where Whittier, Willis, and Haw- 

* Edgar A. Poe, b. 1809; d. 1849. Tamerlane and other 
Poems, 1827 ; Tales of the Grotesque,^ 1840 ; The Raven^ 
1845. Biographies : byGriswold, harsh in its judgments; In- 
gram, full, but over-defensive; Stoddard, wholly fair, not 
extended ; Woodberry (in American Men of Letters^ , faith- 
ful, painstaking, cleverly done, but not altogether sym- 
pathetic. The late Professor Minto's sketch {British En- 
cyclop(2dia)^ very misleading; and Lang's note in his piquant 
Letters to Dead Authors., has kindred misjudgments. 



POE'S PARENTAGE. 



375 



thorne afterward wrought) for an adverse criticism 
of his pretty wife — who managed piquantly the 
parts of Cordelia and of Oplielia. As the baby 




Elizabeth ^Arnold) Poe, Mother of the Poet. 

From a reproduction of a ?niniatiire in the possession of y ohn H. Ingratn, Esq. 

grew, the mated parents slipped away for engage- 
ments in New York, Philadelphia, and Eichmond. 
The pretty mother died at the latter place in 
1811, and the boy Edgar, then scarce two, was 
adopted by the young and childless wife of a 



376 AMERICAN LANDS &- LETTERS. 

Scottish, well-to-do tobacco merchant named 
Allan. With these new parents the boy was 
launched upon a life of luxury. He was bright, 
intelligent, apt ; and before he was six, used to 
declaim, ^*^play parts," and sing songs upon the 
^'mahogany table," for the amusement of his 
foster-father's guests. 

In 1815 the family sailed for Europe; and Edgar 
was put to school at Stoke Newington, under the 
lee of Stamford Hill, some three miles north of 
London Tower. It was a locality that would in- 
terest a quick lad. Defoe had written his story of 
Rohinson Crusoe in a gaunt old building near by, 
and still standing ; and Dr. AYatts had trilled 
his ^^ Infant Songs" in a fine park of the neighbor- 
hood and lay buried thereabout ; but I don't think 
Edgar Poe was ever very tender upon Dr. Watts. 

In the four or five years of that English school- 
life, the boy gets a smattering of French and 
Latin — has his rages at Murray's Grammar — plants 
in deep lines upon his thought, images of darkly 
shaded dells or of brawling rivers (to make sombre 
or stormy, pages of future stories) ; and when he 
sails for home (1820), his quick vision takes in 



UNIVERSITY LIFE. yj-j 

pictures of boiling green seas, or of canvas strain- 
ing from the topsail yards, that will all come to 
him (when he wants them) for the narrative of 
Gordon Pyniy or the glassy whirl of a maelstrom. 
Then — all the while lapped in purple — he has 
his school at Eichmond again ; wrestling gayly 
with Latin and Greek ; a lithe swimmer in 
stretches of the James River ; not large, but firmly 
knit, with broad, bold forehead and lustrous eyes ; 
having his little Byronic episodes of love-making 
to women older than he ; getting himself j^lanted, 
later, at the University (which we have seen 
growing among the mountains under Jefferson's 
care) ; not so much a favorite there, as one ad- 
mired ; shy of intimacies, proud, using the Scotch 
Allan moneys over-freel}^ ; making debts " of 
honor," which Papa Allan will not pay ; and so — 
a break ; the proud boy (aged seventeen) going off 
— after a short year of college life — Boston-ward, 
to seek his fortune. 

Soldier and Poet 

His book of Tamerlane is printed in 1827. Shall 
we catch one little six-line verse from it, to show 



T1.1CEB.LAHE 



AND 



(©^nmm w 



BY A BOSTONIAN. 



Voung heads are giddy, and young heaits are warm, 
And make mistakes for manhood to reform. — Cow per. 



-QO^— 



BOSTON : 

Calvin f. s. thomas printer. 



1827. 




Fac-simile of the Title-page of Poe's First Book. 

From the copy in the possession of Thomas J . M cKee, Esq., of New York. 



POE AS SOLDIER. 379 

how the limner of the Raven pitched his first 



song 



? 



*' We grew in age — and love — together — 
Roaming the forest and the wild, 
My breast her shield in wintry weather ; 

And when the friendly sunshine smiles, 
And she would mark the opening skies, 
I saw no Heaven — but in her eyes. " 

But from the poor, thin book (pp. 40), of which 
a late copy commanded 11,800, no money came 
and no fame ; he enlists in the army (1827) under 
the name of " E. F. Perry ^^ — giving his age as two 
or three years greater than dates warrant ; is Ser- 
geant-Major at Fortress Monroe (1829) ; gets dis- 
charge through agency of friends, and by similar 
agency receives appointment as cadet at West 
Point ; grows tired of this, and after a year is dis- 
missed — by a court-martial which he has himself 
invited — his scholarly '^ rating '' putting him third 
in French, and seventeenth in mathematics, in a 
class of eighty-seven. 

He has twelve cents to his credit at leaving ; his 
pride intense, yet his mates make up a purse 
which gives him a start ; and within the year (1831) 



380 AMERICAN LANDS &- LETTERS. 

there is a fresh, thin booklet * of poems, old and 

new — among them the first stirrings of the lyre 

of Israfely 

*' Whose heart-strings are a lute," 

making echoes that are not yet dead. 

But the cadets do not relish the little green- 
covered volume, nor do many others ; so he 
wanders southward — wins a prize for his story of 
MS. found in a Bottle; encounters for the first 
time J. P. Kennedy, who is his stanch friend 
thereafter always ; sometimes he is sunk in the 
depths of poverty, and sometimes regaling himself 
in such over-joyous ways as have sad and fateful 
reaction. Among the paternal relatives he falls in 
with at Baltimore is the widowed sister of his 
father — Mrs. Clemm, with her daughter of eleven 
(the archetype of his delightful flesh-and-blood 
story of Eleonora), who are thenceforth for many 
a year '^''all in all'^ to him. "With that dark-haired 
girl in her earlier teens, the high-browed pale poet 
— with shrunken purse and pride at its highest — 
may have wandered time on time, over the pretty 
undulations of surface, where the trees of Druid 
* Pubhshed by Elam BUss, 1831, pp. 124. 



POE AT RICHMOND. 



381 



Hill now cast their shadows. There may have 
been a yearning for the latitude of Richmond and 
for the luxuries of the big brick mansion of the 
Allans (corner of Main and Fifth Streets), where 
he had in his boy-days won plaudits for his oratory 
over the mahogany of his foster-father. 




The Allan House, Richmond, Va. 

The hopes that centred there, however, were 
soon at an end ; the kindly Mrs. Allan had died 
in 1829 ; in 1833 the master of the great house had 
married again ; and the year following had gone 
from it to his grave — not without one last inter- 
view, when he had lifted his cane threateningly 
upon the discarded Edgar. 



382 AMERICAN LANDS &- LETTERS. 

But tlie poet finds work in Riclimond upon the 
tSoiitheni Literary Messenger; he has promise of 
ten dollars a week; and upon that promise — tak- 
ing radiance from the poetic haloes of his genius — 
he determines to marry that sweet girl-cousin of 
his, Virginia Clemni — scarce fifteen as yet — and 
establish her, with her helpful mother, in a home 
of his own. There is opposition, strong and pro- 
tracted ; but it is over-borne by the impetuosity of 
the poet ; and the strange wedding comes about 
(1836), the certificate of marriage declaring the 
bride — twenty-one I * 

AVhether by pre-natal influences or forces of 
education, the moral sense was never very strong 
in the poet ; nor was there in him any harassing 
sense of the want of such a sense. He used a hel])- 
ful untruth as freely and unrelentingly as a man 
— straying in bog-land — would put his foot upon 
a strong bit of ground which, for the time, held 
him above the mire. 

But there is no permanent establishment in 
Richmond ; there are differences with the kindly 

* Ilusiing's Court Records^ Richmond ; cited by Mr. Wood- 
berry, p. 98. 



POE IN NEW YORK. 383 

Mr. White of the Messenger ; and presently a de- 
scent npon Egypt (New York), where the Harpers 
publish for the poet the narrative of Gordon Pym 
— full of all the horrors of piracy, of wreck, and 
of starvation. Mrs. Clemm had come with Poe 
on his migration, and eked out resources (which 
did not flow bountifully from Gordon Pym), by 
taking boarders — among them that stalwart, 
shock-headed, independent, much-knowing book- 
seller, William Gowans by name, who — one time 
in Centre Street and again in Fulton and Nassau — 
reigned despotically over great ranges of books, 
and loved to talk patronizingly and in well-meas- 
ured commendation of the author of the Raven. 

Pldladelpliia to Neiv Yorh. 

But we cannot follow piece by piece and flame 
by flame the disorderly party-colored story of this 
child of misfortune — always finding admiration, 
and only pence when he looked for pounds ; and 
only canny distrust where he looked — through 
filmy eyes — for welcome and heart's-ease. From 
New York he goes to Philadelphia, issuing there — 



384 AMERICAN LANDS <&- LETTERS. 

on some new (perhaps extraneous) influence — a 
work on concliology ; making a good many similar 
and fuller works contributary to his treatise for 
learners ; reminding us in a degree of Goldsmith, 
when he wrote about Ayiimated Nature. But if 
our poet of Israfel avails himself of the labors 
and print-work of scientists, he does it with a most 
shrewd and quick apprehension of their " parts ; '' 
and makes his own exhibit of old knowledges with 
the large understanding and keen discernment of 
a man who knows how to gather apt material and 
how to dispense it. 

He has his '"^ romantic" engagements, too, with 
the early magazinists of Philadelphia; with Graham 
(of whom Professor Smyth * tells ns the eventful 
story) — with that rollicking comic actor, William 
Burton, who had his Gentleman's Magazine, and 
afterward (1848) his Chambers Street Theatre in 
New York, where he put multitudes into good 
humor with his Micaiuler and Captain Cuttle. 
There are literary relations in those days, more 
or less intimate, with Lowell — working at his 
Pioneer ; and with Griswold, who is edging his 
* Philadelphia Magazine^ 1741-1850, 1892. 



SPRING- GARDEN. 



385 




Edgar Allan Poe. 

From a reproduction of a dag'uerreotype fonnerly in the possessioi of " Stella " 
(Mrs Estelle S. A. Lewis), now the property of J ohn H. Ingram, Esq. 

way into the good graces of Mr. Graham. We 

note, too, the names of John Sartain (known for 

good work in art lines), and of Godey, and many 

another, in the record of Poe's literary schemings 
25 



386 AMERICAN LANDS &•> LETTERS. 

and life ; we perceive that the interesting girl- 
wife is domiciled with the broad-browed poet in 
a little cottage over on Spring- Garden ways — of 
which Captain Mayne Reid tells us — and how the 
vines and roses overhung it and made of it a bower 
of beauty ; and we learn furthermore, that in that 
Spring-Garden bower, over which the matronly 
and energetic Mrs. Clemm presided, there came 
suddenly a cruel overset of all force in the pretty 
girlish Virginia, who seemed bleeding away her 
life before the awe-struck husband. Thence came 
a shock to him, which he sought to mitigate — as 
his own plaintive record tells — by plunging into 
uncanny ways of self-forgetf ulness. 

It is easy to break asunder the ties holding him 
to this or that city. One would say, looking 
upon the long array of discarded literary partner- 
ships, that it was easy for him to break all ties ; 
yet he was never tired of the tie that bound him 
to the pretty child-wife and kinswoman who goes 
with him to a new home in New York — her 
frailties of health darkly shadowing him ; and he 
shading her in all inapt ways, from the pitiless 
burnings and vexations of their narrowed means. 



THE RAVEN, 387 

Here again, as everywhere, poverty pierces him 
like a knife. But still his hopes are as jubilant 
and exaggerated as his despairs ; most of all, when, 
after working under the kindly patronage of Willis 
upon the old New York Evening Mirror, there 
blazes upon the public eye, on a certain afternoon 
of January, 1845, that weird poem of the Raven 
(copied from advance sheets of the American 
Whig Revietv for February), and which drifted 
presently from end to end of the country upon a 
wave of Newspaper applause. 

I remember well with what gusto and unction 
the poet-editor* of that old Whig Review read 
over to me (who had been a younger college friend 
of his), in his ramshackle Nassau Street office, 
that poem of the Raven — before yet it had gone 
into type ; and as he closed with oratorical effect 
the last refrain, declared with an emphasis that 
shook the whole mass of his flaxen locks — '' that 
is amazing — amazing ! " It surely proved so ; 
and how little did that clever and ambitious editor 
(who died only two years later) think that one of 

* George H. Colton, b. 1818; d. 1847. A poem of his, 
Tecumseh, was published in 1842 by Wiley & Putnam. 



388 AMERICAN LANDS &- LETTERS. 

his largest titles to remembrance would lie in his 
purchase and issue of that best known poem of 
Edgar Poe ! 

If the author had been secured a couple of pen- 
nies only for each issue of that bit of verse, all his 
pecuniary wants would have been relieved, and 
he secure of a comfortable home ; but this was 
not to be. From this time forth he came into 
more intimate relations with those who were 
working on literary lines in New York. Willis 
befriended him frankly and honorably ; Briggs 
became a quasi partner in some journal interests ; 
Godey and Sartain and Graham looked after him 
from the Quaker city with admiring friendliness ; 
in the coteries which used to gather at the rooms 
of Miss Anna Lynch (Mme. Botta), he would have 
met and did meet the sedate and well-read Mr. 
Tuckerman, with Mrs. Kirkland of the New Home ; 
the brothers Duyckinck would have been there, 
and poor Fenno Hoffman ; perhaps also Halleck, 
and Drs. Francis, Dewey, and Hawks — with pos- 
sibly that loiterer upon the stage — Fenimore 
Cooper. 



HOME AT FORDHAM. 



389 



Fordharn and Closing Scenes. 

In 1846, when cherries were a-bloom, we learn 
that Poe (straitened then as always) took posses- 
sion of a little ^^ story and a half ^^ house upon the 




The Poe Cottage at Fordham. 

heights of Fordham, which within a year was still 
standing. There, in a desolate room, his young 
wife contended — as she had done for six years 
now — with a disease that put a pretty hectic glow 
upon her cheek, and an arrow of pain into every 



390 AMERICAN LANDS &^ LETTERS. 

breath she drew. On her best days she walked 
with him ; and other days, and far into nights, 
with whose shades he consorted familiarly, he 
sauntered along Fordham heights, and down, in 
southwesterly way under shaded country roads, to 



k 








¥..- 


..... \ 


^ 





High Bridge, looking toward Fordham Heights. 

the High-Bridge promenade — between protective 
balustrades — from which he could look upon the 
winding streak of Harlem River below, and upon 
the southern pinnacles and witnesses of a city, 
whose hum and roar were dimmed by distance. 
Here the poet elaborated in his night strolls 



EUREKA. 391 

those theories and brilliant phantasies which took 
form at last in the book he called Eureka. It 
purported to be a poetic solution of the secrets of 
creation. Nothing was too large for his grapple ; 
and he nursed with tenderness the metaphysic 
phantasms that started into view when he wrestled 
with such problems. 

Meantime he is busy upon more merchantable 
magazine material in the shape of notes upon the 
Literati, and with those scalding Marginalia which 
invited the thrusts and abuses of a good many of 
his fellow-workers. The amiable Longfellow, with 
Theodore Fay, Ellery Channing, and Margaret 
Fuller, are among those who catch some of the 
deeper thrusts of his critical blade ; while there 
are many poetesses, young and old, who are 
dandled and lulled in the lap of his flattering 
periods. 

The winds were bleak on Fordham heights in 
that winter of 1846-47 ; visitors speak of that 
wasting girl-wife wrapped (for warmth) in her 
husband's cloak, with a '' tortoise-shell cat gath- 
ered to her bosom"' and the mother '' chafing the 
cold feet.'' Again and again she touches the 



«^I^M^ III ■ ' '" I ' ' , 1 ' . 

Fac-simile of the Manuscript of One of Poe's Stories. 

FrofH the collection qf G. M. IVilliatnson, Esq., of Gra7td-Vieiu-on-Hztdson. 



THE WIFE'S DEATH. 393 

gates of death, and rallies ; even so, Leigeia in 
that horrific story of the weird lady, with the 
^' black abounding tresses,^" cheats her lover with 
ever new, and ever broken promise of life ! 

I don't think the child-wife lamented the 
approach of death (January, 1847) ; nor did the 
mother; but to the ^^ghoul-haunted" poet, who 
had lived in regions peopled by shadows, this 
vanishing of the best he had known of self-sac- 
rificing love, was desolating. He was never the 
same again. 

We have hardly a right to regard what he did 
after this — whether in way of writing, of love- 
making, or of business projects — as the work of 
a wholly responsible creature. It were better per- 
haps if the story of it all had never been told. 

In some one of the swiftly ensuing months — 
full of want, and of a drugged craziness of im- 
pulse — he goes with the manuscript of that 
poetic Cosmogony, which was to unlock the 
secrets of the Universe, into the office (161 Broad- 
way) of Mr. Putnam ; and by his impassioned, 
brilliant advocacy almost prevails upon the kindly 
publisher to believe that his book is to outrank 



394 AMERICAN LANDS &^ LETTERS. 

the Principia of Newton, and that a first edition 
of fifty thousand copies was the smallest number 
that should be considered. 

He had his utterance, too, by appointment, on 
the same theme with a carefully prepared digest of 
his work, in the old hall of the Society Li- 
brary (then presided over by the courteous Philip 
Forbes, second of the Forbes dynasty), upon the 
corner of Broadway and Leonard Street. The 
night was stormy, and there were scarce sixty 
present ; but these favored the poet with rapt at- 
tention, as he expounded his theories of the mak- 
ing and unmaking of the material universe. I 
seem to see him again in that gaunt hall, over 
against the Carleton House (where the Century 
Club had its beginnings, in the pleasant fore-gath- 
ering of the '' Column ^^) — the alert, fine, sinewy 
figure with the broad ivory brow and curling 
locks ; with eyes that appealed by their lustrous 
earnestness, as he launched away into the subtle 
and remoter ranges of his topic. That low bari- 
tone voice — distinct — full-freighted with feeling, 
would alone have held one ; all its tones were 
penetrated with the intellectism of the man ; and 



LAST POEMS. 395 

in its more eloquent phrases the talk seemed to 
be the vibrations of a soul quivering there with 
its errand. 

But did he win the entranced auditors to his 
faith ? Alas, no ! There were fine analyses ; subt- 
lest burro wings of thought ; adroit seizure of rare 
facts that bolstered his theory ; a profuse squan- 
dering and spending of the dust of learning — so 
illumined by his glowing rhetoric that it seemed 
a golden cloud ; but scholars missed those big 
nuggets of special knowledge which carry weight 
and make balance good. 

Did he see this? And did the growing tremor 
in his hand, in his lip, in his whole presence be- 
tray it ? Or were these tremors only the sequence 
of some drug-indulgence of yesternight ? 

The strange poem of Ulalume in its last form be- 
longs to those latest years — with its doleful, unreal 
figures, flitting down the ''^ ghoul-haunted wood- 
land of Weir." So does that other wonderful bit 
of word-music which he called The Bells, whose 
tinkle and clanging notes he marvellously wrought 
into waves of sound — carrying echoes wherever 
bells are now — or ever will be — jangled. 



396 AMERICAN LANDS &> LETTERS. 

There is a brilliant phosphorescent glitter in all 
his touches ; but, somehow, we do not keep them 
in mind, as we keep in mind a summer sunrise. 
Humanities are lacking ; figures are wrought in 
ivory ; even the blood-stains upon the robes of 
the Madame Madeleine in that last horrific scene 
of the House of Usher are dreadfully out of place ; 
such phantasms never bleed. We come nowhere 
upon any Miltonic spur '^ to labor and to wait ; '^ 
no '^Footsteps of Angels''' beat a path toward 
Beulah — but rather decoy one toward the '^ dank 
tarn of Auber/' 

In the critical talk of Poe there was a free and 
a perfervid utterance which made for him doubt- 
less many enemies ; but enemies can never bury 
real forces or real merit. In all that respects the 
technicalities of verse, there were in him such art 
of clever adaptation, and measurement of word- 
forces and word-collocation, that no enmities can 
beat down or bewray his triumphs. 

All juggleries of sound are under his master- 
ship ; all the resonance of best brazen instru- 
ments — with here and there a pathetic touch of 
some *^ Lost Lenore" breaking in — like a tender 




Edgar Allan Poe. 



From the Poe Memorial, Richard Hamil/on Park, Scttlptor, presented to the Metropolitan 
Museum of Art by the Actors of New York. 



LAST DA YS. 399 

bird-note ; but there are no such other heart-heal- 
ing melodies — Miltonian, Wordsworthian, Shakes- 
pearian — as not only bewitch the ear, but hang 
hauntingly in our hearts. 

Again, and in highest praise of this erratic 
genius, it must be said, that in his pages — 
even in the magical renderings of Baudelaire — 
there is no lewdness ; no beastly double-meanings ; 
not a line to pamper sensual appetites : he is as 
clear and cool as Arctic mornings. 

After his Virginia had gone from his home 
there was not so much lingering there for Poe : 
there were sudden, quick bursts of travel — to 
Providence, to Lowell, to Boston, to Baltimore ; 
always the old dreams of a great fine journal of 
his own ; always the brilliant forecast of wealth 
and ease and jewels ; always the adoring obeisance 
at the feet of clever beautiful women who had 
jewels of verse or jewels of praise at command ; 
always the fluttering promises (in letters) to that 
kindly Mrs. Clemm — who is keeping the hearth 
warm in his old home — that he is to bring back a 
bride there on the morrow, or the next morrow ; 
always the promises break down, and so do his 



400 AMERICAN LANDS &^ LETTERS. 

failing forces. At last, word reaches the good 
motherly kinswoman at Fordham that the end has 
come ; it happened at Baltimore ; her boy, Edgar, 
has been picked up unconscious in the street — 
has been taken to a hospital, and has died there 
(October 7, 1849). 

There are marble memorials of him which will 
be guarded and cherished ; but there is no Ado- 
nais, no heart-shaking Lycidas, no murmurous 
beat of such lament and resignation as belong to 
In Memoriam. Only the Raven, ''never flitting, ^^ 
still keeps up from year to year, and will, from 
century to century — that wailing dirge of — ■ 
" Never more ! " 



INDEX. 



Abbott, Jacob, 212. 

Abbott, Johns. C, 212. 

Adams, John Quincy, 28. 

Alcott, Bronson, 184; Carlyle's 
opinion of, 184; his "Orphic 
Sayings," 188 ; at Concord, 
191. 

Alcott, Miss Louisa, 184, 

Allen, Dr. William, 211. 

AUston, Washington, 288. 

Alston, Colonel William, 20. 

Alston, Governor Joseph, 23. 

American Monthly., 100. 

American Whig Heview, 387. 

Atla^jitic, The, 343. 

Bancroft, George, at Harvard, 
33 ; in Europe, 34 ; his volume 
of poems, 35 ; Collector for the 
Port of Boston, 46 ; first vol- 
umes of his history, 47 ; his 
marriage, 47 ; comes to New 
York to live, 50; as office- 
holder and diplomat, 51 et seq. ; 
his home at Newport, 56. 

Bartlett, John R., 116 ; his "Dic- 
tionary of Americanisms," 117; 
his book-shop, 117. 

Benjamin, Park, 129 ; 363. 

Bird, Robert Montgomery, 126 ; 
his " Spartacus," 126. 



Boston Recorder., 95 ; 102. 

Bowdoin College, 211 ; Longfel- 
low at, 285. 

Breck, Samuel, his ' ' Recollec- 
tions," 14. 

Bridge, Horatio, 213; letter to 
Hawthorne, 217. 

Brook Farm, 159. 

Browning, Robert, 257. 

Browning, Mrs., 180; 257; 269. 

Brownson, Orestes, 176; 201. 

Burr, Theodosia, 23. 

Bushnell, Horace, 75 ; at college, 
77 ; as a preacher, 79 ; his the- 
ology, 80 ; his sermons, 84 ; 
his character, 87 ; as a literary 
artist, 88 ; his love of nature, 
91 ; 132. 

Butler, Fanny Kemble, 232. 

Calhoun, John C, 20. 

Carey, Henry C, asa publisher, 
10. ■ 

Carlyle and Emerson, 140; his 
opinion of Emerson's "Nat- 
ure," 142. 

Chandler, Joseph R., 13. 

Channing, Wm. Henry, 166. 

Cheever, Rev. George B., 213. 

Chicago, early days of, 28. 

Child, Mrs. Lydia Maria, 169. 



401 



402 



INDEX. 



Christian Examiner^ 130. j 

Clarke, James Freeman, 357 ; his i 
' ' Ten Great Religions, " 358. 

Cogswell, Dr. Joseph, 36 ; at the 
Astor Library, 45. 

Congressional Library, 2. 

Craigie House, Longfellow at, 
288. 

Cranch, Christopher, 169. 

Cushing, Caleb, 129 ; and Whit- 
tier, 311 ; his " Notes from the 
Netherlands," 312. 

Dana, Charles A., 165. 
Dante, Longfellow's translation 

of, 301. 
Darley, F. O. C. , his illustrations 

for ''Margaret," 327. 
Democratic Review, 217. 
Dial, The, 179 ; 184 ; 193. 
"Dictionary of Americanisms," 

Bartlett's, 117. 
Dwight, John S., 165. 

Emancipator, The, 169; 194; 
223. 

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 136 ; his 
boyhood days, 136 ; ordained, 
138 ; as a preacher and pastor, 
138 ; visits Carlyle, 140 ; at 
Concord, 141 ; his " Nature," 
142 et seq.; his home at Con- 
cord, 147 ; his address at Har- 
vard, 148 ; Holmes's biography 
of, 149 ; invited to Brook 
Farm, 154 ; his opinion of Al- 
cott, 184 ; 191 et seq. ; second 
visit to England, 194 ; his 
''English Traits," 195; his 
death, 199. 

" Evangeline," Longfellow's, 294. 



'* Fanshawe," Hawthorne's, 217. 

Fay, Theodore, 104. 

Felton, Professor, 287. 

Fields, James T., 230. 

Fordham, Foe's cottage at, 389. 

Franklin Institute, the, 19. 

Fuller, Miss Margaret, 177; her 
precocity, 177 ; talks with 
Emerson, 178 ; and The Dial, 
179 ; visits Europe, 180 ; mar- 
ries the Marquis Ossoli, 181 ; 
her tragic death, 183 ; 201. 

Garrison, Wm., 194 ; and Whit- 
tier, 308. 

Gentleman's Magazine, 384. 

"Gordon Pym," Foe's, 383. 

Gowans, William, 383. 

Greely, Horace, 179; 359; his 
early struggles, 360 ; starts the 
New Yorker, 363 ; his charac- 
ter, 365 ; his love for farming, 
366 ; the author's visit to him, 
366 ; his tree-chopping, 369 ; 
nominated for the Presidency, 
370 ; his death, 373. " 

" Greyslaer," Hoffman's, 117. 

Grimke, Thomas Smith, 122. 

" Guy Rivers," Simms's, 121. 

Harbinger, The, 161. 

Hawthorne, at Brook Farm, 166 ; 
202 ; his boyhood days, 206 ; at 
Sebago Lake, 206 ; his Specta- 
tor, 208; at Bowdoin College, 
211 ; his "Fanshawe," 217; his 
"Twice Told Tales, "218; as 
weigher and gauger, 218; he 
marries, 220; his "Mosses 
from an Old Manse," 220; his 
love for solitude, 224 ; appomt- 
ed Surveyor at Salem Custom- 



INDEX. 



403 



House, 226; his "Scarlet 
Letter," 229; his life in the 
Berkshires, 2;j2 ; his "House 
of Seven Gables," 236 ; a com- 
parison with Stevenson, 237 ; 
his " Blithedale Romance," 
238; his religion, 239 ; at Way- 
side, 240 ; appointed consul at 
Liverpool, 243 ; his personality, 
247 ; in England, 253 ; in Rome, 
255 ; his " Marble Faun," 258 ; 
home again, 259 ; his attempts 
at farming, 263 ; his death, 
267; "Marble Faun," 270. 

Headley, J. T., 232. 

"Hiawatha," Longfellow's, 294. 

Hillard, George, 223, 229, 287. 

Hoffman, Charles F., 117, 388. 

Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 332 ; 
his "Poems," 333; the au- 
thor's copy of his "Poems," 
334 ; at Harvard, 336 ; in Eu- 
rope, 339 ; professor at Dart- 
mouth, 340 ; at the Harvard 
Medical School, 341 ; his " Au- 
tocrat of the Breakfast Table, " 
342 ; an estimate of, 349. 

Hone, Phihp, 6; sells his house 
in New York, 18. 

Hosack, Dr., 6. 

James, G. P. R., 232. 

James, Rev. Henry, 150. 

Jefferson, ex-President, 2. 

Journal oj Afusic, Dwight's, 165. 

Judd, Sylvester, 322 ; his noble 
character, 326; his "Mar- 
garet," 327. 

Kennedy, John P., 126 ; his 
friendship with Poe, 380. 



Kirkland, John Thornton, 32. 
Knickerbocker Magazine^ 129 ; 
217. 

Lathrop, Mrs., 260. 

Little Women ; 200. 

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 
213 ; his youth, 282 ; goes to 
Europe, 284; his " Outre- 
mer,"284; Professor at Bow- 
doin, 285 ; in Europe again, 
285; his "Hyperion," 286; a 
Harvard professor, 287; his 
"Voices of the Night," 288; 
buys Craigie House, 290 ; 
"Evangeline," 294; "Hia- 
watha," 294; "Kavanagh," 
286 ; retires from his professor- 
ship, 296 ; his "Dante," 301; 
his death, 305. 

Longstreet, Judge Augustus B., 
26. 

Lowell, James Russell, succeeds 
Longfellow, 296 ; 384. 

Lynch, Miss Anna, 388. 

"Margaret," Sylvester Judd's, 
327 et seq. 

Marsh, George P., 59; his boy- 
hood days, 60 ; at college, 63 ; 
in Congress, 65 ; m the Orient, 
66 ; his lectures, 67 ; his " Man 
and Nature," 68 ; Minister to 
Italy, 69 ; his death, 73. 

Melville, Herman, 235; " Omoo," 
"Typee,"and "Moby Dick," 
235. 

Morris, George P., friendship 
with Wilhs, 104. 

New England Magazine, 342. 
New England Review^ 310. 



404 



INDEX. 



New Yorker, The, 360 ; 363. 
New York Mirror, 103 ; 117 ; 

387. 
New York Review, 45. 
New York Tribune, 179; 360; 

365. 
Norton, Dr. Andrews, 32. 

Parker, Theodore, 169 et seq.; 
201. 

"Parley," '^ Peter," 217. 

Peabody, Miss Sophia, 219. 

Pierce, Franklin, 214; 215 ; 243 ; 
present at Hawthorne's death, 
266. 

Poe, Edgar Allan, 373 ; his par- 
ents, 374 ; his adoption, 375 ; at 
school in England, 376 ; at the 
University of Virginia, 377 ; 
"Tamerlane," 377; in the 
Army, 379 ; on the Southern 
Literartj Messenger, 382 ; his 
marriage to Virginia Clemm, 
382 ; goes to New York, 383 ; 
goes to Philadelphia, 383; his 
book on Conchology, 385 ; 
domestic affairs, 386 ; his 
"Raven," 387; his home at 
Fordham, 389 ; his literary 
criticisms, 391 ; his wife's ill- 
ness, 391 ; his Cosmogony, 393 ; 
" Ulalume" and " The Bells," 
395 ; an estimate of Poe, 399 ; 
his death, 399. 

Polk, President, 226. 

Porter, Noah, 354 ; 356. 

Portfolio, The, 9. 

Prentice, George D., 310. 

QUINCT, JOSIAH, 336. 

" Raven," Poe's, 387. 
Reed, Professor Henry, 359. 



Ripley, George, 155 ; starts Brook 
Farm, 156; with the Tribune, 
161 ; his opinion of Hawthorne, 
162. 

Round Hill School, 36 et seq. 

Sanderson, John, his " Ameri- 
can in Paris," 9. 

Simms, William Gilmore, 122. 

Society Library, The, 19 ; 394. 

So^ithern Literary Messenger, 
382. 

Sparks, Jared, 32. 

Stephens, John L., 114; monu- 
ment to, 115. 

Stevenson, R. L., Hawthorne 
compared with, 237. 

Story, VV. W., 256. 

" Tamerlane," Poe's, 377 ; fab- 
ulous price foi", 379. 

Thompson, George, 315. 

Thoreau, Henry David, 191, 223 ; 
his scholarship, 272 ; his Wal- 
den experience, 274 ; at Emer- 
son's home, 276 ; his lectures, 
277 ; as a reformer, 277 ; his 
"Excursions," 278; his lit- 
erary position, 279 ; Emerson 
on Thoreau, 282. 

Ticknor, George, at Harvard, 32. 

Ticknor, W. D., 244; his death, 
266. 

United States Gazette, 13. 

Virginia, University of, 5. 

Ware, William, 130: his "Let- 
ters from Palmyra," 130 ; his 
" Probus," 130 ; comparison of 
his work with " Quo Vadis," 
130. 



INDEX. 



405 



Webster, Noah, 289. 

Whittier, John Greenleaf, his 
birthplace, 306 ; his youth, 307 ; 
attracts Garrison's attention, 
308 ; and the New England Re- 
view^ 310 ; as politician, 311 ; 
at Amesbury, 312 ; his anti- 
slavery opinions, 315 et seq.; 
estimate of Whittier, 318 ; his 
New Englandism, 321. 

Wilde, Richard Henry, hisltalian 
studies, 24 ; discovers Giotto's 
portrait of Dante, 24; his 
verse, 26. 

Wilhs, Nathaniel P., 95; his 



" Absalom," 96 ; his social life, 
97 ; as a poet, 99 ; journalist 
and man of the world, 100 ; 
goes to Europe for the Mirror, 
104; his "Pencillings by the 
Way," 105; in the Mediterra- 
nean, 105 ; meets Landor, 106 ; 
in England, 107 ; his social ac- 
complishments, 107 ; residence 
in New York, 109 ; at '' Idle- 
wild," 113; his death, 114; 
135; 388. 
Woolsey, President, 354 ; 355. 

Youth's Companion^ 102. 



CHRONOLOGIC NOTES. 



1800 Population of United States, 5,500,000 ; New York City, 
65,000; Philadelphia, 40,000; Boston, 25,000. John 
Adams, President, having succeeded to General Wash- 
ington in 1797. Capital removed from Philadelphia to 
Washington, D. C, in 1800, when the city had only 3,000 
inhabitants. 

Bowdoin College in the throes of its beginning ; but only 
in 1802 its Mass Hall ready for lodgers. Birth-year of 
Macaulay and of George Bancroft. 

1801 Thomas Jefferson elected President (by Congress), 
John Marshall, Chief Justice. Union of Great Britain 
and Ireland. 

lSO;3 West Point School established. Ohio admitted to Union. 
Birth of Horace Bushnell. First issue of Edinburgh 
Revieio. Napoleon Bonaparte elected Consul for ten 
years. 

1503 Louisiana purchase ($15,000,900). Birth of Emerson. 
Fulton tries steamboat on the Seine. 

1504 Expedition of Lewis and Clark. Napoleon proclaimed 
Emperor. Burr kills Hamilton. Birth of Haw- 
thorne. 

1806-7' Trial of Burr for treason. 

1807 Fight between "Leopard" and "Chesapeake." Ful- 
ton's steamer '* Clermont " sails on Hudson. Birth of 
John G. Whittier and of N. P. Willis. Boston 
Athenaeum founded. 

1808 Slave trade prohibited by Congress. Birth of LouiS 
Napoleon. 

407 



4o8 



CHRONOLOGIC NOTES. 



1809 James Madison succeeds Jefferson. Battle of Wag- 
ram. Birth of Lincoln, O. \V. Holmes, President 
Barnard, Mendelssohn, and of Gladstone. Ir- 
ving's New York. 

1810 Revolt of Spanish Colonies in America. Birth of Mar- 
garet Fuller, Theodore Parker, and of Asa Gray. 
Population of United States, 7,250,000. Thomas's 
HMory of Pruithig published. 

1811 Birth of Horace Greeley, Edgar Poe, also of Henry 
Barnard (prominent educational writer), and of Noah 
Porter. 

1813 War against Great Britain. Napoleon invades Russia. 
Childe Harold and Niebuhi's History of Rome appear. 
Louisiana a State. American forces invade Canada. 
Birth of Mrs. Stowe. Antiquarian Society, at Worces- 
ter,^ Mass. , established. 

1813 Fight of "Shannon" and ''Chesapeake." Robert 
Southey made Laureate. 

181-1 Capture and burning of the Capitol by British. Mc- 
Donough's victory on Lake Champlain. Napoleon ab- 
dicates. Motley, the historian, born. Treaty of Ghent. 
" Hartford Convention." 

1815 Battle of Waterloo. Battle of New Orleans. 

1816 Indiana admitted. Bolivar prominent in South Amer- 
ican wars. 

1817 Monroe succeeds President Madison. Mississippi ad- 
mitted. Moore's Lallah Rookh. Thoreau born. 
President Day succeeds Dr. Dwight at Yale. 

1818 United States flag adopted. Illinois admitted. Seminole 
war begins. 

1819 Alabama admitted. Republic of Colombia established 
under Bolivar. Congress of Vienna. Birth of Victoria. 
Steamer "Savannah" crosses the Atlantic. Birth of 
Lowell, Melville, Whipple, Holland, and Whit- 
man. 

18S0 Maine admitted. Spain cedes Florida. New York 
Mercantile Library established. Irving's Sketch- 
Book. Missouri Compromise. Population of United 
States, 9,600,000. 



CHRONOLOGIC NOTES. 



409 



1833 
1833 
1834 

1835 



Cooper's Sjiy published. Pennsylvania Mercantile Li- 
brary established. Dr. William Allen elected Pres- 
ident of Bowdoin. 

Birth of General Grant. Maine Historical Society es- 
tablished at Brunswick. 



Cooper's Pilot and Pioneers. Birth 
Monroe Doctrine dates from 1823. 



of Parkman. 



Visit of Lafayette. Laying of corner-stone to Bunker 
Hill Monument. Oration by Webster. Birth of 
George William Curtis. 

John Quincy Adams succeeds President Monroe. 
Opening of Erie Canal. Cooper's Last of the Mohicajia. 
Birth of Batard Taylor. Historical Society, Hart- 
ford, Conn., incorporated. 

1836 Death of Jefferson and John Adams on 15th of July. 

1837 Poe's Tamerlane and Miss Sedgwick's Hope Leslie. 

1838 Hawthorne's first romance of Fanshawe. 

1839 Andrew Jackson succeeds Quincy Adams. "Spoils" 
system comes into vogue. Quincey succeeds Kirkland 
at Harvard. First "double-sheet" number of London 
Times issued. 

1830 Death of George IV. Famous debate of Webster and 
Hayne. United States population at this date, 12,- 
866,000. Louis Philippe, King of France ; Charles X. 
flies. 

1831 Garrison's LAberator established. Indiana Historical 
Society, also Historical Society at Cincinnati, Ohio. 

1833 Banquet to Washington Irving on return from Eu- 
rope. Charles and Fanny Kemble play in Xew York. 
BuiGHAM Young joins the Mormons. Death of Walter 
Scott. 

1833 South Carolina completes longest line of railroad (at that 
date) in the world. Trade to China opened. 

1831 Horace Greeley (with others) establishes New Yorker. 
Romish convent burned at Charlestown, Mass., by an 
anti-Popish mob. First vol. of Bancroft's United 
States History. 



4IO 



CHRONOLOGIC NOTES, 



1835 Bennett's New York Herald established. Great fire in 
New York. Famous "Moon Hoax" appears in Sun. 
Longfellow's Outre-Mer. 

1.S36 Arkansas and Michigan admitted. Death of Aaron 
BuRK and of James Madison. Dr. Holmes's first vol- 
ume of poems issued. 

1837 Van Buren succeeds Jackson. Great commercial 
crisis. Suspension of specie payments. Hawthorne's 
Twice-told Tales. Victoria comes to English throne. 
Independence of Texas recognized. 

1838 " Great Western " makes first trip (fifteen days) from 
Bristol. Wilkes's South Sea expedition sails. Emer- 
son's address at Divinity Hall. 

1839 Rebellion in Canada. Daguerre takes first daguerreo- 
types. Longfellow's Hyperion. Emerson's Nature. 
Leonard Woods succeeds Dr. William Allen in 
Presidency of Bowdoin College. 

18-10 Union of the Canadas. Marriage of Victoria. Begin- 
ning of New Houses of Parliament. 

The ^'' Brook Farm^^ project under Dr. Ripley. The 
Dial established — edited by Miss Fuller. Census shows 
United States population of 17,069,000. 

18-11 Harrison succeeds Van Buren. Longfellow's 
Voices of the Night. New York T'riftwwe established. 

1 813 Ashburton Treaty. Brook Farm in operation. 

1813 Death of Noah Webster. 

1811: Oxford Tracts. Drs. Pusey and Newman arraigned by 
Archbishop of Canterbury. Morse's telegraph ' ' set up. " 

1815 President Polk succeeds Tylfr (who filled place of 
the dead Harrison). Judd's Margaret appears ; 
also Margaret Fuller's Woman in the Nineteenth 
Century. 

181C President Woolsey succeeds Dr. Day at Yale; also 
Edward Everett to Josiah Quincey at Harvard. 
Mexican War. Settlement of Oregon dispute. Texas. 
Wisconsin, and Iowa join the Union. Emerson's 
Poems, and Hawthorne's Mosses from an Old Manse. 



CHRONOLOGIC NOTES. 



411 



18417 Capture of Vera Cruz and Mexico. Burning of phalan- 
stery at Brook Farm. Gold discovered in California. 

IS-AS Revolutionary spirit active in France and throughout 
Europe. Emerson's Representative Men. Poe's Eu- 
reka^ a prose poem. Free - Sellers nominate Van 

BUREN. 



1849 



1850 



Jared Sparks succeeds Edward Everett at Harvard. 
General Taylor succeeds Polk ; he prohibits expedition 
of American adventurers against Cuba. Riot in New 
York (Astor Place) occasioned by the playing of the 
actor Macready. 

Census shows United States population of 23,200,000. 
California admitted. Henry Clay's Omnibus Bill does 
not end slavery agitation. Hawthorne publishes Scar- 
let Letter ; Melville his White Jacket. In England 
KiNGSLEY issues Alton Locke, Bulwer his Harold., and 
Dickens completes David Copperfield. 



1851 



First "World's Fair" in Hyde Park, London. Death 
of Audubon and of Cooper. Conspicuous book issues 
are : Casa Guidi Windoivs, by Mrs. Browning ; House 
of the Seven Gables, by Hawthorne ; Christ in Theol- 
^9yy by BuSHNELL ; and Stones of Venice., by Ruskin. 

1853 Death of Daniel Webster and of Henry Clay. Issue 
of Uncle Tom's Cabin ; also of Dickens's Bleak House., 
Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance., Thackeray's Es- 
mond, and Reade's Peg Wofflngton. 

l'853 President Pierce succeeds Taylor (and Fillmore). 
James Walker succeeds Jared Sparks at Harvard. 
Curtis's Potiphar Papers. 

1854 Commodore Perry opens Japanese ports. " Ostend 
Manifesto" and filibustering to Cuba. Struggle for Kan- 
sas. Immigration (to United States) reaches number of 
half a million. 

1855 Victoria and Napoleon exchange visits. War with 
Russia. Bombardment of Sebastopol. Prescott pub- 
lishes portion of Philip IL. (left unfinished at his 
death, in 1859). Longfellow's Hiawatha and Charles 
KiNGgLEY's Westward Ho ! 



412 



CHRONOLOGIC NOTES. 



1856 Death of Percital and John Pierpont. Assault on 
Sumner in United States Senate Chamber. Fremont 
nominated by Free-Soilers. Emerson's English Tracts 
and Mrs. Browning's Aurora Leigh. 

XSST" Sepoy mutiny in India. President Buchanan succeeds 
Pierce. "Dred Scott" decision. Financial panic. 
Thackeray's Virginians and Holland's Bay Path. 

1858 Famous Lincoln and Douglas debates. First Atlantic 
cable laid. Minnesota admitted. Holmes's A^itocrat 
and Bushnell's N'atiwe of the Su2:)er natural. 

1850 John (Ossawatomie) Brown's raid upon Harper's Ferry 
and subsequent execution. Washington Irving dies, 
and Delia Bacon (chief advocate of the Baconian-Shake- 
speare claim). Liberation of Lombardy. Admission 
of Oregon. Dickens's Tale of Two Cities, Stowe's 
Jfitiister's Wooing^ and Hawthorne's Marble Faun. 

1860 Census shows population of 20,000,000. Professor Pel- 
ton succeeds President Walker at Harvard. "Peter 
Parley" and Paulding die. Emerson publishes his 
Conduct of Life; and in the following year begin the 
Presidency of Lincoln and the War of Secession. 













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